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

Only do the fun part

[DNS-and-BIND]

So why would anyone want to do the boring part of programming? Stay with the fun part, starting projects! Then, when it's 90% done, abandon it and let the next idiot take it over. I've known so many good ideas that were never finished, and the creator not only declines to continue, but angrily rejects the idea that she should be forced to finish what she started.

I've seen this happen so many times, and the key idea here is novelty. Doing something new. It's the short attention span that demands a constant flow of shiny trinkets, each different from the last. It's bizarre seeing that a core idea of the engineering mindset, and programmers as a subset of that is (or was) damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. Seeing an idea through to completion no matter what obstacles appear. In fact, overcoming those obstacles and finishing the project, whatever it might be, is (used to be) a great source of pleasure and pride.

Indeed in this very thread I am seeing people who have no conception of finishing projects and are baffled that anyone might want to do anything but the fun part. That's the part that hurts - not that different perspectives exist, but that these diverse perspectives have no intellectual space to recognize that alternate ideas even exist, and regard those who think differently as weirdos. :(