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What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

andrej.sh

21–30 of 171 posts

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#22

I don’t understand. It’s your project, you do what you want and nothing more.

Yesterday I received this message from a random github user: "Seriously. No SSO at all in free version? This is poor. Very very greedy and poor" [1]

If you do not spend a lot of time explaining things at length, people will link back to how much an asshole you are.

[1]: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/issues/661#issu...

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#24
post #18

This is why I like building outside plant. You put the fibre up on poles or pull through ducts, splice it, bring it into the building, hook it up to the equipment, make sure it's working and.... you're done. It works until something breaks, usually for a very clear reason (power outage, drunk driver, rodent, vine, lawnmower man, fibre seeking backhoe, dump truck, direct lightning strike, thermal cycling of a marginal…

You're talking about being a tradesman on a forum dedicated to software and maybe making a company out of said software? If people liked the idea of being outside in the weather, doing manual labor as you've described, there is a very large chance they would not be on this forum.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#25

I don’t understand. It’s your project, you do what you want and nothing more.

Yesterday I received this message from a random github user: "Seriously. No SSO at all in free version? This is poor. Very very greedy and poor" [1] If you do not spend a lot of time explaining things at length, people will link back to how much an asshole you are. [1]: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/issues/661#issu...

LOL all that user does is open issues for free support?

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#26

Kinda frustratingly written by ai

I very much doubt it. Never seen an AI consistently miss capitalising the first letter of each sentence for example. The style is efficient in a way that just screams software dev to me. AI's are needlessly verbose. This guy is bordering on needlessly concise. Rather like the style actually.

I do hate that if you publish anything online these days, someone will accuse you of having used AI to write it.

We're at the point we need to coin a law for it. With tongue firmly in cheek, we could call it Turing's Law perhaps?

"Any person who publishes any text on the internet will be mistaken for a robot"

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#27
post #17
post #15

> maintaining kaneo means helping people debug their setups. and honestly? it's taught me more than i expected. > people run kaneo on setups i never imagined: > behind corporate proxies > ... > in kubernetes with custom networking It's OP's project so they're welcome to support whoever they want but I definitely would not offer free support to customers who are obviously using the product commercially, especially in…

But the company wants a proper invoice. And not every single developer is interested in founding a Limited and getting the tax office breathing down their neck every year. Also, look at Gitea. People got paranoid and forked the project after the original author did exactly that.

Come on, stop with this slave mentality please. You can make invoices without funding any company and without the tax office getting in your hair. It's not illegal to charge for your services and never has been. You can declare that income just fine, or skip it. The tax office won't bother you.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#28
post #18

This is why I like building outside plant. You put the fibre up on poles or pull through ducts, splice it, bring it into the building, hook it up to the equipment, make sure it's working and.... you're done. It works until something breaks, usually for a very clear reason (power outage, drunk driver, rodent, vine, lawnmower man, fibre seeking backhoe, dump truck, direct lightning strike, thermal cycling of a marginal…

You're talking about being a tradesman on a forum dedicated to software and maybe making a company out of said software? If people liked the idea of being outside in the weather, doing manual labor as you've described, there is a very large chance they would not be on this forum.

It's very often that people here lament the fact that they're not outside being outside, in the weather, doing manual labor. How may of us don't dream, at least once a week, of walking out into the woods, or taking up woodworking instead, or wondering how long it would take to retrain as a plumber?

I channel that into my gardening during the appropriate seasons, but now that it's November, all that woodworking equipment in the garage is lookin' mighty appealing.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#29

I don’t understand. It’s your project, you do what you want and nothing more.

Ya OP is shadow boxing. There is absolutely no need for any of these things.

Tons of open source exists as only source code and a license, nothing else. No docs, no issue tracker, nothing. People who need it use it, learn from it, remix it, whatever, but there need not be any engagement at all from the given repo's maintainer.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#30
post #15

> maintaining kaneo means helping people debug their setups. and honestly? it's taught me more than i expected. > people run kaneo on setups i never imagined: > behind corporate proxies > ... > in kubernetes with custom networking It's OP's project so they're welcome to support whoever they want but I definitely would not offer free support to customers who are obviously using the product commercially, especially in…

This is not as simple as it sounds. Just yesterday I had a call with the Delft university of technology in Netherland, they want me to add some features on the free version of my FOSS product [1] but they did not want to pay anything. Over the last month, I was in contact with a 800B publicly traded company for a 1.8k per year invoice, once we agreed on the general direction they kept adding expectations, first was to sign tons of paperwork with their security checklist, legal stuff which took a few days but when they start asking for things that would take potentially weeks more, I invite them to do extras on a contracting basis, since them I have never heard back and of course they never paid a dime. I have literally tons of stories like this from governments to F500. In my bubble the paid support plan mostly work with US entities.

[1]: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

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