Hacker News Reader

Comment by cool-RR | Hacker News Reader

Maintainer of a few open-source projects here. I've seen some angry sentiment from other maintainers about people demanding they implement features without contributing back. There was a piece on hn recently where a maintainer went ballistic on GitHub about big corporations not paying him for his work.

It's pretty funny to me. I had a bunch of people ask me to implement features or fix bugs, and I just told them I don't want to spend time doing that. Very few had gotten entitled, and even those went silent when I told them I'm a volunteer.

I think it's still important to let people speak and ask for things, even if you're not going to give it to them. Also I have zero expectation of anyone ever paying me for my open-source contributions.

One nice thing about rude people is that at least they tell you what they want.

View on HN

Exactly, I often say: yes, this seems like a valid bug report but I am currently focusing on other things at the moment, though I will be happy to review and accept a pull request if you figured out how to solve your problem. I have yet to see an entitled reaction to that (maybe I am lucky though).

Your experience matches with mine, if people request features I don't feel like working on, I reply with "yes, this is something I would merge if a PR were submitted, thank you!".

Then again, my experience with FOSS has been almost exclusively positive. People have never been entitled to me, they've always been helpful, and I've gotten people co-maintaining projects and submitting lots of PRs to me as well.

It was perhaps that optimism that led me to create https://www.codeshelter.co/, which didn't really do very well. Turns out not as many people want to maintain projects as I thought.

Wow, I've not seen codeshelter.co before but that is an amazing idea, thank you so much for putting that together!

I've already got a handful of projects I maintain, but I've got a little more bandwidth. I'll take a look at the list ;-)

Don't give up on that! Code Shelter will grow. We just need more awareness. I'll help with that.

Thanks! I used to come across unmaintained projects that I'd be willing to merge some PRs for (they'd usually have them pile up), that's how I came up with the idea.

I think most people expect that they'd add their project and get immediate help, when the project is more a backup plan to straight up abandoning a project. I think you're the first person other than me to get excited by it, so thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com