The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

This was so easy to "sneak" into the process where I work:

> The fastest way to get results is for me to contribute a fix.

> Can't we copy their code and fix it locally?

> Absolutely, but then we won't get any fixes from them in the future, unless we set up our own build infrastructure and have a team make sure that they merge across changes regularly.

... which starts sounding like lots of money. Your employer cares about the bottom line, so make it about the bottom line. The Linux Kernel is a fantastic example of egoistic altruism in action. You don't need to hire people to fix arbitrary things in OSS (although that would be appreciated), just fix the things you care about.

Finally, getting a PR merged into a big project makes any other method of training look grossly incompetent - and it's free. Go ahead and cancel that company-wide Pluralsight or Linked-in Learning contract, now we're saving money.

Don't ask for open source developers, ask to fix things in open source.

The maintainer is under no obligation to fix anything.

Oh there's a bug in this or that edge case? Please send a pull request and I'll consider it.

I'm curious about when open source coders transition from enjoying sharing their product to feeling obligated to support their product to wanting some form of monetization when supporting their product becomes a job. Is it normally companies causing this or unrealistic expectations?

I know myself, when I put something in open source I feel a responsibility to maintain it for no reasonable reason.

There's a great Strange Loop talk by Evan Czaplicki (of Elm fame) where he alludes to the challenges of maintaining an open source project.[1] In it he describes how feedback often starts as an innocuous "Why don't you just...?" where the person making the request doesn't have the full understanding of the system as a whole and may see their request as a simple one-off that can be done quickly.

To answer them fully, the open source maintainer has to respond with a long explanation of why their suggestion isn't an option. Or, maybe they don't respond and now the original poster doesn't feel the community is supporting them. This asymmetry can lead to poor communication in the community.

I've been working on an app and was reading about the pros and cons of going freemium vs. pay up-front. I was surprised to read that people suggested the pay model is better for indie devs because with free, you'll have more users, but you'll also get worse feedback from the free users. Maybe there's a correlation between seeing something as free and feeling that the work behind it is trivial?

[1] https://youtu.be/o_4EX4dPppA

I think it should be easier to make "mods" to existing codebases. I tried, once: https://github.com/liolaarc/monki (jeez, 5 years ago now.)

It's basically a git clone + a literate programming file that describes what changes to make to the code. It worked pretty well, though I often wonder whether it was just some silly idea.

So essentially, if you wanted to apply a fix to an open source codebase locally for your business, you could do that. It would be a clone, followed by a patch. (In this context, a "patch" is simply "here's the existing code I expect; here's the new code to replace it with." It works until that specific code changes at some point in the future.)