It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
I agree: it is OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty. However, it also can simultaneously be not OK for you to publish it in a package directory with a generic name and a description talking about how awesome it is as a trap for other people to run into, and that is really the core problem: it isn&#x27;t that you didn&#x27;t spend an unreasonable amount of time and money to make a good product that no one paid for (though I do know--all too well, as the sole maintainer of some key projects for a sometimes ungrateful ecosystem--that there are many people who really are just looking to be assholes), it is more often that you overhyped a side project and then put it somewhere obvious for other people to find it, only for them to discover that it was &quot;a bit shitty&quot; long after they deployed it; and sure: it is totally their fault for deploying something without carefully reading your code to figure out that it was a bit shitty beforehand... but should they really have to do that? When you release code that you don&#x27;t intend to back up with a ton of time and resources, please do the rest of us a favor and use a name that no one is going to mistake for a standard package, put a note on it that says &quot;this is a side project&quot; so expectations are clear, don&#x27;t write a readme file in the past tense about features you hope to one day implement, or, if you just can&#x27;t bring yourself to be responsible like this, maybe just reconsider whether you need to publish it at all, as it actually doesn&#x27;t <i>necessarily</i> make the world a better place <i>just</i> because it is open source. Seriously: if you bring something that you know tastes bad or will make someone sick to the potluck and put a little sign on it saying &quot;gourmet enchiladas: much better than what you get at the store&quot; and put it in the center of the table, it is still a problem <i>even though</i> &quot;it is ok for you to not really know how to cook or not have that much time and participate in the potluck anyway&quot;.