The burden of an Open Source maintainer
&gt; <i>Despite how much some people detest the stale bot [...]</i><p>I <i>detest</i> the stale bot :-)<p>And I really think it only is a disservice to the project, 99% times I see it used. If the code has a <i>genuine, real defect</i>, it will not &quot;go away&quot; magically just because nobody complained again, or the authors didn&#x27;t have time to look on it.<p>See, the issue <i>is there</i>. Don&#x27;t have time? Ok leave the issue open, it acts as a documentation about, well, that <i>there is an unsolved issue</i>.<p>I really hate when googling about some problem and then finding a promising bug tracker conversation that then... got comments closed because of old age. That&#x27;s literally swiping the problem under the rug.<p>Now regarding burnout and burden of OSS maintainers, I might lack a bit of empathy here, but I just don&#x27;t get it. Really the license text says it all: THIS PROJECT IS OFFERED AS-IS. Most if not all OSS licenses have a phrase like this. Just quote those words 100 times if it&#x27;s needed. My mental health as an OSS maintainer is very well and I cannot see it being changed by some, even lots, of demanding users at any point. Every time someone takes my code and uses it, there is an implicit conversation where I go &quot;hey, here you are take this work for free, I&#x27;m lending it to you AS-IS, do whatever you want with it!&quot;. Absolutely at no point in time I feel pressure about defects in the code, after having this imaginary conversation.<p>I guess we need more spreading of the notion of &quot;not giving a sh*t&quot; so the idea gets extended to more and more OSS maintainers, helping them have a happy life not encumbered by the work they decided to release by sheer goodness. EDIT: with this last phrase I mean that one should have the mentality of contributing up to, and not more, what one is able to do within their own limits. The &quot;not caring&quot; I mention is for <i>after</i> reaching this limit: it will help not pushing through the burnout line, and thus as a result being happier in the long term.