My boundaries as an open source developer

I found that working in the Linux distro space doesn't have this problem, especially in the pre-COVID times when there were annual in-person conferences and lots of socialising.

In my opinion, I think most of these issues outlined in the article are caused by lack of communication combined with unclear expectations, to be honest.

The only thing I ask of open-source library authors/maintainers is this: be upfront and clear about the nature of your library, and your level of commitment.

Is it just a hobby app? Totally fine, just put in bold text "this is a hobby app, not recommended for production use". That way, everyone knows what to expect, and if they do decide to use it in production, they do it at their own risk.

Do you feel that it is feature-complete? Then just say so, and indicate you will not be doing any more work on it.

Do you want to work on bugs whenever you feel like it? Nothing wrong with that, it's your work, but again, please just put it somewhere in writing so that any developer or PM who comes across your library knows exactly what to expect.

You painstakingly supported a library for years, got burned out and want to quit? At least try to pass it to another maintainer.

IMO these are just some very, very basic things that open-source authors can do that would alleviate a LOT of the friction that occurs in this space between them and those who decide to rely on their work.

Be kind, be clear, be upfront. That's it!

For the most part, creators giving away their work for free don't insist that the people it's offered to accept it. A small portion of obnoxious creators make a point of insisting that some portion of people who aren't using it are obligated to use their work.

Obnoxious users are effectively discouraging, because not only does the population of users outnumber the population of open source authors by many orders of magnitude, not only also because the population of those who don't have the skills to do it themselves or contribute in a functional way is entirely contained within the 'users' category, but most importantly because each obnoxious user has only the authors of the few open source projects that they're using to be obnoxious to. Open source creators who talk about obnoxious users (usually without naming them) are often effectively criticized within the vast hordes of users.

Obnoxious open source creators are easily ignored, since there are so few of them, and they have millions (give or take an order of magnitude or two) of potential users to harrass. Open source users talk about these open source creators (usually calling them out by name), and those creators become well known as obnoxious cranks to be avoided.

Usability-wise, one could lead with a terse bulleted list of "use cases" for which people should contact you, and how.

Then state you can't handle all the other usual reasons people want to interact with an open source developer, maybe giving examples. Then follow it with explanation of why.

I'm a full-time maintainer that has luckily made it work. Donations don't work. Carving out business specific features and paywalling has worked for me.

But it's not a tenable solution for most projects. I've been thinking about how people in your position can basically "cash out". It is sitting dormant, PR authors are too intimidated by maintenance to take the lead. Maybe some sort of robotics vertical-focussed Private Equity type organization could buy out your project (where you get paid to essentially transfer the repo to their GH org, they would then take up maintenance and monetisation)? Would you accept a deal from them? How much would you ask for one of your popular repos?