My boundaries as an open source developer
I had a very similar experience with running open source projects. I was getting frustrated with people not contributing in any significant way. Functionally useless bug reports. Coding bootcamp students submitting PRs that did nothing but change some grammar in the README (and never actually changing it correctly). Feature requests for things I had explained in several other issues that I would never do. Requests for support in setting up <i>other</i> people&#x27;s software.<p>But if people are contacting me about my project, they must be using it, right?  Isn&#x27;t that the point? Can&#x27;t I just ignore the noise? What&#x27;s the problem?<p>I eventually realized my motivations for developing <i>open source</i> software were rooted in vanity. Just making programs is something I do all the time, I find it very rewarding. But the part about open sourcing it, that was the vanity.<p>Before opening the project, nobody else was contributing anything to it, either. After opening it, all that changed was that my expectations for how people would react to it were not met. Expecting people to want to use my software in exactly the way I wanted was a hell of a lot of arrogance. Those people who were requesting features, they weren&#x27;t &quot;wrong&quot;, they just wanted different software. More like a service that did the things my software could enable, rather than building things with my software.<p>I don&#x27;t write the software to get rich or escape a dead-end job. I used to have that fantasy, but nowadays life is pretty happy, and I also have realized the fantasy was always a myth, anyway. So in the end, the difference between writing software and writing <i>open source</i> software is nothing more than me wanting recognition for the thing I created; aka a vain search for glory.<p>I didn&#x27;t like that view of myself, so I stopped opening my software.