Freek.dev

In this post Derick Rethans ask maintainers and users to have empathy for each other.

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In this post, Francois Zaninotto explains why and how he stopped working on Faker.

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Paul Dragoonis and Christoph Rumpel started a projecto to improve the synergy between the community and the project maintainers

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My colleague Seb lists a few very good actionale tips that help you maintaining open source software.

In the 4.5 years I’ve been a developer at Spatie, over 200 packages have been built and released by our team. I’ve done quite some authoring and maintenance over the years, and I’d like to share 8 actionable tips on writing and maintaining open source software without going insane.

Read more [sebastiandedeyne.com]

Jeff Geerling, currently working as a technical architect at Aquina, wrote a good post on when and why he closes PRs to the packages he's maintaining. This paragraph resonated with me.

I don't cater to everyone. I usually cater to myself. And for 98% of my OSS projects, I'm actually using them, live, in production (often for dozens or hundreds of projects). So I'm generally happy with them as they are. I will not add something that increases my maintenance burden unless it's very compelling functionality or an obvious bugfix. I can't maintain a system I don't fully understand, so I like keeping things lighter and cutting off edge cases rather than adding technical debt I don't have time to pay off.

http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/why-i-close-prs-oss-project-maintainer-notes

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Michael Bromley on his blog:

There is an implicit agreement which needs to be understood by both consumers and creators of FOSS projects¹. It goes something like this:

• I agree to provide you with some free code which solves your problem.
• I recognize that in doing so, I have taken on a small portion of responsibility to you as a user of my code.
• I agree to try to help you if you have difficulty in using my code.
• I agree to try to fix bugs that you find in my code.
• Crucially, you agree that I, in acting without remuneration, am free to assign priority to the above points as I see fit.

The last point is the reason why I haven’t fixed your issue yet.

As a package consumer you should be grateful for the free code you're given. Keep in mind that when you use someone else's code, you are responsible for that code as well. If a package maintainer solves an issue for you that's great. If he or she doesn't, than that's your problem, not the maintainer's. You can always submit a PR with a fix. And if the fix or feature doesn't get accepted you can always maintain your own fork.

For our own packages we try to respond to every single issue in a timely manner. The users of our packages are generally very friendly and helpful. There's only one instance when things went sour. I do make a point of thanking everybody who takes the time to submit a PR. It's a small thing but I do believe it helps creating a positive vibe on our GitHub repo's.

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