Comment by aikah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aikah | Hacker News Reader

It's a wider problem with open source in general. Starting a project to build your career is great, but a lot of projects end up with the creator "not having the time to maintain it anymore".

Sure, in the open source world nobody owes anybody anything. And it is the responsibility of the user to choose carefully the libraries he is going to use.

But when asked, creators often refuse to delegate, add contributors with merge rights ... so the project is abandoned and of course the issues accumulate on Github. Or someone forks the project and make it his own then the cycle continue.

That's personally why I stopped using Coffee-script for instance. "J is busy" was often used as an excuse to let things rot for 2 years... except it's a fn programming language people depend on... so busy J needs to delegate or give stewardship of the project to someone who has the time ...

It's obvious to me that a corporation backed or foundation backed opensource project is always preferable to one lead by a single person that will sooner or later abandon the whole thing.

I think the author is handling "not having time to maintain it anymore" well. Rather than just throwing up his hands, he's offering a clear and disciplined economic argument, and a way to balance the equation back in favor of the project.

Despite the blog post, hapi.js has only 8 open issues, 2 of which are bugs. Seems like they've done a good job maintaining a stable framework.

>> It's obvious to me that a corporation backed or foundation backed opensource project is always preferable to one lead by a single person that will sooner or later abandon the whole thing.

I've been working on a popular open source project for 3 years and I have no plans of stopping. There are only three conditions which would cause me to quit:

1. People stop using it.

2. I become physically/mentally incapacitated.

3. I die.

Also, I'm sure someone from the community would step up and take over of the project if I got hit by a bus.

I think that there is no correlation (single person vs corporation); there are pros and cons in both cases. Hapi was backed by Walmart Labs (corporation). SailsJS started running into issues with their community precisely when things started to get commercial.

I think that a lot of popular 'single person' (started by a single person) projects might actually last longer because the original authors tend to feel more responsible to the people/companies who have entrusted them personally. Also, in the single-person scenario, the author might perceive 100 users as being a lot; while a corporation might think that 10K users is not a lot.

Small projects not backed by corporations are usually more tight-knit.

> 2. I become physically/mentally incapacitated.

You're lucky if your job does not wear you down to the point at which this is the case; most people are not.

Sure, but it's about balance and setting expectations with the users of your open source framework. Being transparent and delegating responsibility. Your project can only scale as well as you can and that is limited by the number of hours in the day. It's called "open source" for a reason and typically the nature of open source is not money but shared knowledge and contributions. If you're looking for money it probably should just be closed source.

It's not mutually exclusive Hapi was backed by Walmart which is still the largest user of Hapi.

Then why isn't Walmart funding it ? doesn't sound like a Walmart project. Of course plenty of OS projects backed by corporations are abandoned. My point is a project backed by a corp has higher chances being maintained in the long run. So that aspect matters to me when I decide to use something or not.

It does not matter whose is the project. Many, many companies uses that framework and for them Eran like a the goose that lays the golden eggs. That is the key. Who is going to pay anything for that they can get for free.

Someone smart ? It's fairly decent way to ensure a critical piece of your infrastructure will see continued development.

Maybe those companies don't need continued development? If it's already a critical piece of their infrastructure that must mean it's at least good enough (and probably better). And if things blowup, or a "must have" feature is identified then they can always pay Eran his hourly rate to get what they want when they want.

Then why isn't Walmart funding it ?

In this post he mentions, "Since I am no longer employed by a major corporation generous to pay me a salary to work on hapi,". That "major corporation" was Walmart.

edit: You can see it's old URL at walmart labs via archive.org

https://web.archive.org/web/20150101071959/http://walmartlab...

IIRC Hapi and its ecosystem was borne out of Walmart Labs while Eran was employed there. I would guess that Walmart was "funding" it at the time by paying him a salary.

Once he left they probably felt like they had a team that could contribute to Hapi core themselves if needed, and had no desire to sponsor continued work on the project other than having employees spend time on features/fixes they required. I could be way off -- just a guess at their reasoning.

So basically they are probably still using it but don't contribute back to the open source version?

I have no basis for any of this, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case. The licensing allows it and allows them to maintain more control.

Not necessarily. They could still be pushing meaningful changes upstream even if they have forked the project (I have no idea if they've forked or not).

By the way, npm uses Hapi: http://blog.npmjs.org/post/88024339405/nearing-practical-mai...

I 100% agree but it's only "a problem in open source if you don't recognize the situation". I've been writing about this a bit on Medium. https://medium.com/@ekryski/your-open-source-is-a-product-st...

Thanks, this is a great blog post about the matter.

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