The Realities of Being a FOSS Maintainer
When Caddy made their announcement earlier this week, I shook my head with pity at what they were about to endure. I could have given them a list of all of the shitty (and merely unhelpful) things people were going to say to them, because I&#x27;ve heard them all, too. There&#x27;s a deep streak of meanness, and, as the post states, entitlement, in the OSS user community (much less so in the developer community, which doesn&#x27;t overlap as much as it once did, though sometimes developers do it, too).<p>And, the really awful thing is that if the project continues, it&#x27;ll never stop. Every once in a while someone or some group will get a bee in their bonnet about the thing not being open enough, or the authors not following or not understanding the license (as though the copyright holder needs a license), charging too much for the one little thing they reserve for paying customers (no matter how small that amount is...we charge as little as $6&#x2F;month, and we still get complaints about price).<p>And, there&#x27;s always a huge misconception that because an OSS project has a lot of users it must be making a lot of money, especially among the people who won&#x27;t tolerate <i>any</i> action that would actually make money for the project.<p>What I&#x27;m trying to say is that OSS is a hard-as-hell way to make a living (I&#x27;ve done it for my entire professional life, over two decades now), and there&#x27;s gonna be a handful of users who will make it unpleasant. I love it when I can build some one-off thing and just throw it over the wall onto Github and never think about it again...where I can take a &quot;use it or don&#x27;t, but don&#x27;t ask for my time&quot; attitude. Making a business out of an OSS project makes it harder to select good users (who become good customers), though you have to in order to survive.