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

andrej.sh

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

#41

Post by venturecruelty »

nickelpro wrote: post #29
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #4

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.

Seriously. If I throw something up somewhere, you get a tarball, a README, and no way to get in touch with me. If the code helps you, fantastic! If it doesn't, then I hope you at least got something out of the experience. But "as-is" means what it says on the tin. I'm not sure why people are so hellbent on treating every message from every stranger as important.

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

#42

Post by gerdesj »

neumann wrote: post #12

This is actually nice and balanced, but the title is misleading. I feel like ALL I hear about maintaining an open source project is how hard it is and how people burn our. I almost never read a blogpost or comment declaring how rewarding it is. So, this was a nice (slightly) more balanced view.

There are a lot of happy open source projects rocking along ... happily.

You may not hear about them here or on your socials but it is possible you are not hearing everything. For example, do you have a presence on Mastodon or Lemmy (for example)?

There are a lot more channels too (you mentioned blogs).

Just like the roads you drive on seem to repair themselves sometimes (sort of), FOSS keeps on rocking along with minimal fuss, driven by a vast army of people who do what they can when they fancy it.

Look at the evidence: There is a vast, publicly accessible, free and open source, pool of software for you to download and play with. It gets larger daily but individual stories are immaterial - they might be described or not.

Look at the community: Along with all that software, often there will be a community. Arch, Gentoo and many others are legendary in providing resources to engage with.

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

#43

Post by stevage »

neumann wrote: post #12

This is actually nice and balanced, but the title is misleading. I feel like ALL I hear about maintaining an open source project is how hard it is and how people burn our. I almost never read a blogpost or comment declaring how rewarding it is. So, this was a nice (slightly) more balanced view.

>the honest truth

>maintaining an open source, self-hosted project is:

> more work than building it > different fun than building it > more rewarding than you'd expect > harder than you'd expect > worth it

I'd say the title is not misleading: what they don't tell you is that is more rewarding than you'd expect and worth it. (Because yes, we mostly hear the "it's too much work and not worth it" story.)

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

#44

Post by aleph_minus_one »

Klonoar wrote: post #20
mbirth wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. I feel like it shouldn't be poor form to say on this site - a site that predominantly has been about building tech companies and revenue streams - to get over it and charge them .

[flagged]

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

#45

Post by [deleted] »

neumann wrote: post #12

This is actually nice and balanced, but the title is misleading. I feel like ALL I hear about maintaining an open source project is how hard it is and how people burn our. I almost never read a blogpost or comment declaring how rewarding it is. So, this was a nice (slightly) more balanced view.

[deleted]

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

#46

Post by venturecruelty »

>but here's the thing: people come from different backgrounds. what's obvious to me after building the thing isn't obvious to someone installing it for the first time.

Sure, but you're also not obligated to do... well, anything. And people are also allowed to read documentation and code and put in the effort to build and install things themselves. What happened to the oldschool hacker spirit that rewarded learning and helping yourself? If you show up to a group of people and say "how do I make this work?" while showing zero evidence that you've actually done anything, you'll be politely told to fuck off. I promise it's okay to say no to people, especially people who haven't demonstrated that they've put in their own time to understand something.

But this is immaterial anyway. I don't know how to better explain that you don't owe your time to strangers on the internet, some portion of whom are probably not even human. Alternatively, you could get them to pay you, especially the organizations "behind corporate proxies". If they can afford a corporate proxy, they can certainly afford your time, as long as you value it appropriately.

So yeah. Stop working for free, and stop treating every last internet stranger as relevant.

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

#47

Post by SoftTalker »

carlosjobim wrote: post #27
mbirth wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The IRS will definitely bother you if they figure out you have unreported income. Will they find out? Maybe not if it’s a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars. More than $10K? Then it gets more likely. If a client sends you a 1099 then they’ll certainly know.

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

#48

Post by faidit »

venturecruelty wrote: post #35
Klonoar wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I feel like it shouldn't be poor form to say on this site - a site that predominantly has been about building tech companies and revenue streams - to get over it and charge them .

Especially a site that frequently champions, shall we say... more creative forms of running a company in its early stages (like how Spotify started out charging money for pirated music). If it's okay for OpenAI to launder copyright, it's okay for you to send a net-30 PDF to a Fortune 500 company. Alternatively, people could just stop complaining about it.

Well the laws are like spider webs that only catch small bugs. It's "okay" for a Spotify or OpenAI because they can hire lawyers and expect to blitzscale. Harder to take those risks for a random solo developer who just wants to make things.

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

#49

Post by digi59404 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #27
mbirth wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn’t true. The tax office will bother you, the client also will demand you have an actual company with liability insurance and more.

There is a tremendous amount of legal and paperwork once you start accepting money and working with corps. It’s a nightmare.

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

#50

Post by SchemaLoad »

amarant wrote: post #26
orthodonticjake wrote: post #2

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 p…

There's a bunch of typical ChatGPT catch phrases in the post "Here's the thing", "but honestly". You can't know for sure but it really does look like OP wrote it then stuck it in ChatGPT but told it to not fix the capitalisation for some reason.
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