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've heard them all, too. There'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't overlap as much as it once did, though sometimes developers do it, too).And, the really awful thing is that if the project continues, it'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/month, and we still get complaints about price).And, there'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't tolerate any action that would actually make money for the project.What I'm trying to say is that OSS is a hard-as-hell way to make a living (I've done it for my entire professional life, over two decades now), and there'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 "use it or don't, but don't ask for my time" 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.