Benutzer kämpfen, weil kritisches Open-Source-Projekt dem Untergang überlassen wird

Richard stallman, for all the good he did, was not an economist.

Was it „Left to die“? really?….

I’ve been an open source maintainer on a modest sized project (which I will not name here). It sucked the soul from me, and nearly destroyed my desire to stay in the field.

1. **Finances.** it was 100% self funded, and while expenses weren’t terrible it also cost me about $200-300 USD per year on various things.
* While I did allow sponsorships, over a three year period I had exactly 2 donations for a grand total of $6 USD.
* Eventually I did add ads on my documentation, which hurt me emotionally as I am against advertising in principal. This did bring in ~$10USD per month, it helps to offset the personal cost, but still not enough to cover yearly
1. **Time**. I still had a full time job working ~45 hours per week, as well as a spouse and child to support. The amount of time I had to spent working on a „hobby“ was very limited in order to maintain my own sanity.
* just time spend maintaining and updating dependencies would take a few hours per week to vet. (automation helps, but it is still time consuming on the human side too)
* This means that the fun stuff, like bug fixes or new features would need to fall into the cracks where I could
1. **The community**. This is the big one. While most of the users were either silent or supportive, a small minority of the user base was very entitled and rude, especially when it came to requesting specialized niche feature requests for their specific user cases, or complaining that their specific bug wasn’t given high enough priority compared to others.
* While the project did have a large install base (> 10K, < 100K), In a three year period I very few people attempt to actually help out via pull requests. Most were accepted, a few had to be politely rejected.
* Every change made to the project had consequences. Fixing a bug for user X, would make user Y complain and vice-versa.
* I stepped away from the role about two years ago, publicly, and to this day am still getting hate mail from people that I am not prioritizing their specific request, even after explaining (again publicly) that I am no longer involved with the project, and offering them alternatives.

**TLDR:** Companies that critically rely on open source software to operate need to start supporting maintainers, just because the software is free to use doesn’t mean that it has no cost.

Maybe require money for fixing bugs. No money -> no fix. Might introduce a new interesting dynamic.

This sounds like a company wanting to take ownership of open source projects … no one is stopping them contributing but my guess is they want more than that

I switched over to Caddy and it sets up HTTPS automatically and didn’t have to mess with a lot to get it working.