There are plenty of good things that come out of it, however, I'll be focusing on the dark side of it on this thread. 🌑
Revealing the dark side of open source projects
🧵👇
There are plenty of good things that come out of it, however, I'll be focusing on the dark side of it on this thread. 🌑
It's not unusual to see companies leading the top starred/ forked and used libraries out there.
Angular (Google)
Font-Awesome (Twitter)
React (Facebook)
Bootstrap (Twitter)
Tensorflow (Google)
Flutter (Google)
VsCode...
Here's the thing: 👇
Then, with a bit of luck we can gain some track and carry some people with us on the way.
Gain some stars, becoming a trending dev a couple of days and have a usable and decent project
It is a constant flow of new bugs, issues, questions, enhancements… A never ending task demanding constant monitoring.
That's what I like to call: "The maintenance dilemma".
At some point in time, you’ll have to take a decision:
1 -You stop maintaining it.
2- Or you keep doing it.
You’ll have to choose between a barbecue with friends during the weekend or fixing bugs and closing issues by yourself at home.
Between chilling out with a movie or adding new "urgent" feature.
You know you won’t have time for it unless you decide sleeping is for losers, and at that point, your life is at risk.
Are you sure about that?
I bet you've found tens of unmaintained or dead projects with no support and issues getting accumulated
The "community" tend to just use your "free" project and few are the ones willing help maintaining and improving a project in the long term.
Now, on top of all you do, you'll have to review their pull request, understand it and potentially get into a conversation to fix that issue/feature you've never thought of.
https://t.co/zWfvFiA3Jo
Sure! But specially if developers working on them don't burn out.
Great open source projects tend to be the ones maintained by developers who get paid to work on those.
Those who can dedicate their full-time and effort on improving them.
"But Alvaro, how? Didn't you burned out?" 👇
6 months after that I quit my job to dedicate full-time to it.
I happily answer emails, stackoverflow questions, Github issues, Webflow forums and DMs on Twitter.
I don't see it as a sacrifice anymore but as great opportunity to work on what I like.
It's good for me AND it's good for developers who want to use it.
I've been lucky finding this equilibrium, but not everybody can.
When this doesn't happen, the dark side might end up turning down some projects on the way.
Here's great talk from @fat from Bootstrap and Bower explaining why he feels guilty creating open source projects and the cost of it:
https://t.co/v5a7ZXUtHb
And remember:
“If Once You Start Down The Dark Path, Forever Will It Dominate Your Destiny.”
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The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.
This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.
The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."
This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.