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Comment by jicea | Hacker News Reader

> Users need open source projects, but open source projects do not need users.

I get what’s the author is trying to say, but, as a maintainer of a small, free, open source project [1], I’m really happy to get more users:

- having more users helps to keep motivation

- it helps also with the credibility: we work in a large telco, and popularity can justify us working on it on our work hours

- we get more feedbacks, more bug reports and so we improve our tools. As we use it intensively, it’s benefit for us

When your project reach a certain level of popularity, maybe you don’t « need users » any more but I think the majority of GitHub projets are small, relatively obscure, and can benefit from feedbacks, usage etc…

[1] https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl

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+1 I agree that user feedback/ideas on improvements and simply knowing what other people value is a key thing, at least for me.

My open source projects consist of about 70 GitHub repos for things that interested me. For things that really interest me, I work them into my free (optionally people can pay me) eBooks[1]. Sometimes readers make really good suggestions for improvements which I very much appreciate. I also use the fraction of books voluntarily paid for as a key signal of what people value so I tend to expand those books with new examples and material. BTW, off topic, but I am starting a long process of converting all of my eBooks to a very permissive Creative Commons license so the material can be re-purposed, even commercially, by other people of companies.

[1] https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson

This is a good point. The long tail of not that popular or active GitHub projects, would like to get more active or more users it's definitely not causing any problems for anybody.

The creators are not overwhelmed by too many demands. And the requesters are absent.

The whole issue of controlling your work the amount of work you have and making money out of that, really only applies to projects that get a certain level of attention, for the people in the situation where they want to make money out of it. If you're a student or otherwise don't need the money of course you don't have to care about that

For the casual browser, most helpful would be a "Why Hurl?" paragraph. Hurl is no doubt a play on haxx.se's famous curl -- but how are they different, what problems are best addressed with one or the other, or some other tool?

It’s on the documentation home [1] and on the GitHub README [2]:

Why Hurl?

- Text Format: for both devops and developers

- Fast CLI: a command line for local dev and continuous integration

- Single Binary: easy to install, with no runtime required

It’s maybe too succinct, but, at least, it’s here! We have also a more detail view on our FAQ [3]

[1] https://hurl.dev/#why-hurl

[2] https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl#why-hurl

[3] https://hurl.dev/docs/frequently-asked-questions.html#yet-an...

Sometimes you just want to make something for oneself and not have to bother with what caring about having users entails for some people.

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