On Being a Free Software Maintainer
One of the things I&#x27;ve started to wrap my head around lately is the essential inhumanity of technology. It&#x27;s a near-daily occurrence of mine to having to deal with something that&#x27;s just plain dumb, and just have no way at all to fix it. I can&#x27;t make the system better, I can&#x27;t make any kind of suggestion to anyone so that my situation won&#x27;t come up again.<p>There&#x27;s nothing to do but to just accept it, put whatever workarounds I can come up with in place, hope I can remember what I did before the next time it comes up, and move on. It regularly moves me to anger, with nowhere to put it. It&#x27;s not fair to unload it on your coworkers or your manager. So I&#x27;ll vent a little bit, still trying to find the best way to do this, and just hope I&#x27;m not a raging alcoholic by the time I&#x27;m 40.<p>But I&#x27;m a skilled tech worker whose getting paid very well in order to deal with these things. If they&#x27;re not just douchebags, I would guess that most people who get unreasonably angry at OSS maintainers are not getting paid very well to deal and are likely the target for generated externalities. They need a focus, someone to hold responsible.<p>But tech is inhuman and so there is no one to hold accountable. And if ever there was someone to hold accountable, by God get rid of that chink in the armor! The OSS maintainer thus becomes that chink.<p>I sometimes wonder if the brave new world that the West is building is not the great horn of plenty that we all believe it to be, but rather a monster that consumes the best parts of us and spits the rest out, too cruel to just put its victims out of their misery.<p>Then I remember that inhuman bureaucracy is nothing new, and pour another glass.