This has been discussed before and it has been true for me as well. I don't have a large, super-popular package I maintain, but several lesser known ones, some of which I wrote, and several of which I just adopted and passively became a maintainer over time.

At some point the pressure from the community made me pass the magical threshold between fun/useful/rewarding and downright chore.

It has permanently changed my perception of OSS management, to the point that I stopped releasing further projects, no matter how small, simply due to the work that these entail.

Just look at the discussions you find here monthly about being "a good author/maintainer/leader", where most expect full documentation, professional landing pages, useless code of conduct, and so on... BESIDES the project itself. You'll be criticized irregardless.

I have deep respect for the maintainers of popular OSS projects because of the amount of s*it they must take. I know I wouldn't do it for free at these scales. I also wouldn't do it besides another job since it is so demanding.

Oh this is infuriating:

> You will be told that you need to develop a thick skin.

It's the equivalent of a bully taunting with "stop crying!"

I have been doing open source for about 10 years. A couple of my projects have 1000+ stars on gh for what it's worth.

Most people are chill. Some people disagree without being disagreeable. Then there's others who are completely toxic. A guy who was cto of a company and wanted to use one of my libraries made me absolutely miserable for weeks. Wrote about the experience here:

http://charlesleifer.com/blog/your-idea-sucks/

This has not been my experience. I maintain various popular and not-so-popular projects (although maybe not to the level of gnome calendar) and I just work as much as I want. If I don't feel like handling an issue right then, I say I won't have time soon and that PRs are appreciated.

The vast majority of people are understanding, I don't remember anyone making a fuss about it.

The way I have learned to deal with it is switching to a mostly read-only software publishing. The default of my answers to issues is some sort of "No", which might be "good idea, but not now", "good, but not planned, PR open", "not within the project's objectives", "bad idea, there's a better way", etc.

This is not great, I'd love to be able to do OSS fulltime and help hundreds of people out there. But the reality is that, with a fulltime job, it is either not helping 90+% individuals or risking burning out, which would be even worse (especially for me). Also, the fact that my software is used by millions of people per year (directly and indirectly) and I've received $10 in donations in total (~5 years of OSS) hints me that it's a very non-sustainable market.

Are there any benefits to being a free software maintainer beyond the obvious pride and satisfaction that comes with the role? For example, is this something that people mention on their resumes? Does getting a job become easier and when you do, can you negotiate higher salaries?

Our world is incredibly indebted to Free Software Maintainers and I wonder how we can pay them back in our little ways.

One thing that helps is simply not engaging with tiresome people. I ignore painful questions and let someone else on the mailing list answer. I make requests once in code review, and then ignore that PR if there is tedious argumentation.

I kinda have a similar situation. I upload my hobby projects on GitHub. It has about 90 repos by now. Most of them are just garbage that no one looked at. One of them amassed about 3000+ stars over time. People keep sending me numerous pull requests, but I'm very picky about the coding style and I pretty much ignore all of them. I also ignore most issue reports and feature requests because I'm not interested. Some people asked to hand over the project to someone else, but even picking a good person is a huge hassle to me. So I just left the project pretty much dead as it is. Still, it somehow keeps getting more stars.

Am I a bad/irresponsible person? Since anyone can fork the project I don't think I'm doing disservice to the community (whatever it is). Also I'm frankly a little annoyed that I am getting this by just using my personal repo and mostly being passive (I've never promoted my project anywhere, except uploading it on PyPI).

Edit I can see that there would be a moral issue if I used my GitHub creds for my personal gain (such as applying for a job). But I've never done that. Again, I've never asked for this and I just want to play in my sandbox.

I maintain a few very different packages, and have had some good experiences and bad experiences. What I maintain ranges in size and complexity from Javascript libraries, database add-ons, and virtual synthesizer modules.

I've dealt with hostile users, and hostile packagers, but ultimately I've stuck with it due to some quite incredible challenges and communications I've received, ranging from very difficult problems that they've reached out for help solving, causing me to rethink some solutions, to very nice notes asking if it's ok to use software that I released as building-blocks (what it was designed and specifically licensed for). But, there are still those people that I dread hearing from, that make me want to just stop -- thankfully there are enough of the other kind, and interesting problems, to keep me going.

As for donations - I have only put donation links on the virtual synthesizer modules, and have received a grand total of $5, not exactly game changing, but worth a pint of beer.

So, I maintain for another day, maybe not as actively as some would like, but at least at a level that keeps me from burning out on it.

Having worked on commercial applications with freemium models, I’ve had the distinct impression that the free users are more demanding and pushy and rude than the paying users.

I’m not certain about that though, because there are always like 10x or more free users than paying users, so the volume of interaction with free users is simply much greater. It would be interesting to study and find out whether free users are more entitled than paying users, statistically. Anyone know if such research has already been done?

These "problems" are not specific to open source projects: Whenever you provide a service of some kind, very few people will thank you, most will just use it and another very few will be very vocal about where, how and why you are an incompetent idiot who is just waiting for their advice.

But the "problem" really does lie with you if you cannot tell people they got what they paid for (in case of pro bono work, like FOSS-development, even more).

Once upon a time I organized an annual pretty large demonstration for the legalization of Cannabis in Europe. After every event, at the first meeting, we had people show up who understood we desperately needed their advice. You can either let them hurt you or you sit back, light up and play ping-pong with them... Listen 10 minutes, then spend 10 seconds to confront them with reality (actual laws and regulations, the practicalities of your work or simply your experience of actually /doing/). It can be fun.

But wether it is fun or a dreadful experience is only defined by you.

My advice? Don't.

FOSS, in my experience, will not make you money, will not get you a job, and will gradually suck up more and more of your free time until you have none left.

In can also be tedious and frustrating, especially dealing with users.

Usually if any money is made off of your labor, it's made by other people, and they never contribute any of it back.

Spend your time on something you can monetize.

A lot here applies to non-free software as well: if you omit the 'free' in the title and article, most of the statements still hold.

> It means you are trusted. It means you are trustworthy. It means you are skilled enough.

It means those things to the org that made you the maintainer. It means nothing in particular to the users, bug reporters, and people who offer up fixes and features who don't already know you.

> If you are open to review other people’s contributions, there is a high change you will find challengers disguised as contributors.

New devs making a first-time pull request typically do not yet trust a project's dev process. They also realize that the project has no way to trust their own skillset. To break the stalemate the new dev typically "oversells" their patch set and errs on the side of TMI to the point of being defensive.

Doesn't it fall to the maintainer to keep things positive, clear, and on-topic in such situations? If the org takes that as a necessary skill of a maintainer and mentors to it, it's at least possible to have a decent experience as a maintainer. If not, then I speculate any maintainer would interpret those skills as out of scope for project maintenance.

I also speculate they'll interpret each "challenge" as a distraction from their duties and steadily progress toward an increasing likelihood of burnout.

I am running a free job posting website (postjobfree.com). Every day I receive about a hundred emails with various requests, questions and complaints (from recruiters, job seekers and operators of other job boards).

Some of these emails are negative or even rude. But that negativity does not really bother me. I evaluate level of "Negativity" in the email to understand the nature of the request better (Is the request realistic? Is the request fair? Could our team realistically prevent that negativity in the first place?)

Requests like: “How dare you not (use your free time to) fix this ultra high priority bug that is affecting me?” -- I do not even consider negative. In fact, that is a positive comment to me, because it may indicate an opportunity (to make our job board better or to even add another revenue stream).

The complainer in such case already did some of the work for our job board: identified potential problem, described how to reproduce it, defined the use case explaining why fixing that problem is important.

If that is not helpful feedback, then what kind of feedback is more useful?

I definitely appreciate every free software maintainer out there. Hats off for your hard work.

What I appreciate a bit less is a burnt out maintainers that does not ask for help and has his hands full. Hats off for your hard work, we use your library and we want to help. You are not alone.

What I dislike is a burnt out maintainer / not so great person of multiple important libraries of a popular language that randomly closes issues and PRs without explaining the reasons and then blocking people once asked why he did close an issue that was still relevant.

If it's a personal project open sourced, sure, you have the absolute freedom to do whatever you like. If it's a multi-maintainer project that has a huge piece of the market, then that's absolutely not okay - it causes a toxic environment that only damages the library and it's future.

> People really do find their way to you.

Sigh... and everyone else thinks programming is a lonely job.

My advice to other OSS project maintainers - unless you are paid to do so in a 9 to 5 job, just walk away. It's not worth the aggravation. I just woke up to the fact that the majority of my self-entitled users were working for multi-billion dollar firms and they were not contributing a line of code or stitch of documentation. With a handful of exceptions, you can't make a living off of open source alone. Patreon and OpenCollective is a great way to make coffee money.

What is the latest, state of the art way to earn money this way ?

One serious problem with most of OSS libraries is that, no project will tell you, what's the upsides and downside of the project, or the things the project could do and couldn't do. So, most of the time, the user must spend serious efforts to evaluate if it's OK for them or not.

Of course, this is hard and often not reasonable to do. But at least, let's do things based on some assumption.

The author maintained a calendar app and received this level of "appreciation".

Imagine if he was maintaining a core piece of software more people use, like: a web browser or SSH client...

You need a thick skin to maintain free software, and that's not something that you can grow... either you have it or not. It's not for everybody.

The biggest mistake some software maintainers make is showing empathy for abusive and unreasonable users. Most of them simply deserve to have the door slammed in their faces. If you can't do that, then you'll lose your time and stress yourself.

One of the things I've started to wrap my head around lately is the essential inhumanity of technology. It's a near-daily occurrence of mine to having to deal with something that's just plain dumb, and just have no way at all to fix it. I can't make the system better, I can't make any kind of suggestion to anyone so that my situation won't come up again.

There's nothing to do but to just accept it, put whatever workarounds I can come up with in place, hope I can remember what I did before the next time it comes up, and move on. It regularly moves me to anger, with nowhere to put it. It's not fair to unload it on your coworkers or your manager. So I'll vent a little bit, still trying to find the best way to do this, and just hope I'm not a raging alcoholic by the time I'm 40.

But I'm a skilled tech worker whose getting paid very well in order to deal with these things. If they're not just douchebags, I would guess that most people who get unreasonably angry at OSS maintainers are not getting paid very well to deal and are likely the target for generated externalities. They need a focus, someone to hold responsible.

But tech is inhuman and so there is no one to hold accountable. And if ever there was someone to hold accountable, by God get rid of that chink in the armor! The OSS maintainer thus becomes that chink.

I sometimes wonder if the brave new world that the West is building is not the great horn of plenty that we all believe it to be, but rather a monster that consumes the best parts of us and spits the rest out, too cruel to just put its victims out of their misery.

Then I remember that inhuman bureaucracy is nothing new, and pour another glass.

>You may not feel the joy of working on what you work anymore. You may want to move on. You may also not do that due to the sense of responsibility that you have to your code, your community, and the people who use your software.

I run a popular website, and I switched from selling books, to free content.

I make 6 figs at the day job, but put in 2-3 hours a night on figuring out new ways to save time or save money. The occasional email is nice, but its a very temporary feeling. I consider it my responsibility to society, so things will be free, but it also means only 1-2 people study this.

Capitalism and growth might cause me to change.

This is true. But then you get maintainers like Ulrich Drepper.

I use a lot of open source packages, and I’m immensely grateful to anyone who maintains one.

I also want to mention that I donate whenever the option is available.

However, here is my personal opinion that will most likely get downvoted to oblivion: if you are putting a tool out there for others to use (not just software but any tool), then you are responsible for its wellbeing and maintenance, regardless of whether you charge money for it.

In my opinion, it is irresponsible to release something, anything, and then abandon it.

If you don’t want to be responsible for it, for example if it’s a hobby project or something, keep the repo private. If you release it with the intention of maintaining it, and your circumstances change later, do your best to find another maintainer.

If you want to charge money for it, do that.

But if your attitude is gonna be “I’ll work on this when I want, however much I want, and you should just be grateful for what you get and deal with it” then, well, that’s where my sympathy and respect for you ends.