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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

#141

Post by hombre_fatal »

nickelpro wrote: post #130
imiric wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/sigh Because open source is not just about the code and the license. It is first and foremost about a community of people who want to make software better for everyone, not just for themselves or a select few. The code and license are ancillary to this goal. I won't get into this discussion again. I'll just say that if you think otherwise, whatever good you think you're putting out into the world, is not much better…

You have this entirely backwards. Open source is, definitionally, the code and a license. It is "first and foremost" those things. The community of people cannot exist without the code and the license. The code and the license can and often does exist without dedicated communities. Everything else in open source is a cultural projection entirely ancillary to the code and the license. > I'll just say that if you think…

Maybe you are lasering in on a term we use to describe software, but they are talking more broadly about maintaining open source (lower case, btw) collaborative software.

- https://lkml.org/

- https://www.postgresql.org/list/

Though I have to be very charitable to grant your point.

Even your examples support their point of "people who want to make software better for everyone, not just for themselves or a select few". Stallman just cared about code, like fixing his printer, and not a whole social movement?

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

#142

Post by icar »

mickael-kerjean wrote: post #22
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #4

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...

Cool project, gave it a star and bookmarked it.

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

#143

Post by bitfilped »

You need to stop wanting to help others as a developer, in that context it's a toxic mindest that will slowly kill your projects, time, personality, passion, and self. You made the project for you and chose to share it to others, that's all you need to feel responsible for. If others need to adapt it to fit their use cases, it's on them to do so.

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

#144

Post by kykat »

dbg31415 wrote: post #74

I get that he just wants to build something alone in his basement -- without product managers, sales guys, or customers with SLAs breathing down his neck. But he's doing an enormous amount of work specifically to avoid charging money for something that's already providing real value. That's the part that feels odd to me. If you've got "200 users" who rely on your tool so deeply that a migration glitch would seriously…

From the license:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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

#145

Post by mbirth »

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 .

Depending on the local laws, that's easier said than done. E.g. in Germany, a private entity (read: person) can't just bill a company. And you can't just write something that resembles an invoice either. Especially, you're not allowed to make it look like a business invoice by putting net sums on it.

A German business on the other side of the transaction rarely will pay anything if there's not a proper invoice (listing net sums and VAT separately) on file. And they usually also require the (business) tax ID of the other party.

To be fair, founding a business is a matter of filling in some form, paying a small fee, and a few days of time (depending on the workload of your local trade office). But still - if this is a one-off thing and you don't even know whether there will be more... I'm not sure I'd want to go through the hassle. Especially if it means having to hire an accountant with monthly costs, when I don't even know whether there will be more income.

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

squigz wrote: post #135
bcrl wrote: 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…

> fibre seeking backhoe I don't know why but this amused me. Is this a feature one can get when buying a backhoe?

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by ximmer »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #93
singpolyma3 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No evidence of this

The evidence is in all of the text. It is dripping with it. The cadence, the abuse of headers, the abuse of bullet points, "not X, but Y" multiple places it doesn't make sense. > automation isn't lazy. it's sustainable: [bullet points] A software developer did not write that. I would bet my entire net worth on that if the bet could be arbitrated objectively, at virtually any odds, because it would be free money. > th…

Hi @anonymous908213

Your comment made me register for a HN account for the first time ever in my life (I have been lurking since 2009/2010).

I did not even think to consider that the OP's submission was AI and I felt dirty, violated and even saddened that a developer home page; something I long assumed in my 35 year old mind to be sacred, technical and a place where you could read honest thoughts about programming was now polluted with genAI.

I always treated them like open source docs or linux contribs pages or deeply technical or academic sites where you could 100% definitely trust that the developer would not waste your time or tell lies.

I think this episode has finally made me decide to go video only, f2f meetings or just zero-out reading from my life.

Just thought you should know what your comment did for me. The whole post now reads cheap, like they didn't value or care about what they said or how readers would feel.

- Ximmer

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

#148

Post by brazukadev »

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.

If all you hear is the bad things, the title is quite accurate

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

#149

Post by squigz »

venturecruelty wrote: post #46

>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 an…

What happened to the old school hacker spirit of helping others and sharing knowledge?

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

#150

Post by mperham »

mickael-kerjean wrote: post #30
mtlynch wrote: 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 t…

Really: add a zero to your price. These companies burn millions on procurement bureaucracy. Make them pay for your misery.
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