Open Source Roles: Starters vs. Maintainers (jlongster.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla developer James Long has posted a sort of internal monologue on the difficulties of being a hobbyist open source project maintainer. He says, "I hugely admire people who give so much time to OSS projects for free. I can't believe how much unpaid boring work is going on. It's really cool that people care so much about helping others and the community. ... There are two roles for any project: starters and maintainers. People may play both roles in their lives, but for some reason I've found that for a single project it's usually different people. Starters are good at taking a big step in a different direction, and maintainers are good at being dedicated to keeping the code alive.

I am definitely a starter. I tend to be interested in a lot of various things, instead of dedicating myself to a few concentrated areas. I've maintained libraries for years, but it's always a huge source of guilt and late Friday nights to catch up on a backlog of issues. ... Here's to all the maintainers out there. To all the people putting in tireless, thankless work behind-the-scenes to keep code alive, to write documentation, to cut releases, to register domain names, and everything else."

Comments

Re:Who would want to be a maintainer?

[Kjella]

I'm not sure this is accurate. If it were, why would anyone choose to be a maintainer, stuck fixing small bugs for years on end and having little to do with the movements forward?

Hardly anybody starts as a maintainer, it just creeps up on you. Like some years ago I was busy trying to get some games to work under WINE, filed some bug reports and found various tweaks to make them work. Since there wasn't a maintainer in the appdb, I signed up. And then it just became a habit to fire up the games when new versions came out, even some I'd grown tired of just to check that it was still working or if there were regressions, if the tweaks were still necessary and so on. Once they totally broke some games and I bisected it back to the commit and it got fixed. Maintenance is what keeps things working, you do it a little bit for yourself and a little bit for the public good.