On Being a Free Software Maintainer
This has been discussed before and it has been true for me as well. I don&#x27;t have a large, super-popular package I maintain, but several lesser known ones, some of which I wrote, and several of which I just adopted and passively became a maintainer over time.<p>At some point the pressure from the community made me pass the magical threshold between fun&#x2F;useful&#x2F;rewarding and downright chore.<p>It has permanently changed my perception of OSS management, to the point that I stopped releasing further projects, no matter how small, simply due to the work that these entail.<p>Just look at the discussions you find here monthly about being &quot;a good author&#x2F;maintainer&#x2F;leader&quot;, where most expect full documentation, professional landing pages, useless code of conduct, and so on... BESIDES the project itself. You&#x27;ll be criticized irregardless.<p>I have deep respect for the maintainers of popular OSS projects because of the amount of s*it they must take. I know I wouldn&#x27;t do it for free at these scales. I also wouldn&#x27;t do it besides another job since it is so demanding.