Open source maintainers underpaid and going gray
Open source maintainers underpaid and going gray
AI-coded contributions? Most would rather skip the bot's work
You're viewing a single thread.
I have a lot of free time and am willing to contribute.
But the responses I largely got from reaching out to several projects pushed me away again.
If you make someone who wants to help you for free feel like they're ringing your doorbell begging for money, then don't be surprised when your project dies with you.My "favorite" was one of the lead devs of Slackware, who deployed an edit I had proposed to one of his pages in the Slackware wiki "in the hope of avoiding conversations like this in the future".
Same with me. I asked upfront if they would accept a PR for a minor change. I described the issue in detail and my proposed fix.
He said sure.
I made the PR.
Same guy comments, "Wtf do you need this for?! We already have X solution with Y features."
I reply back, "Because Y doesn't cover Z use case, which is what I need it for."
The issue was closed without further comment.
I got a single class that supported new hardware written for a controller. They said they don't want the overhead of maintaining an additional class for new hardware (a class that doesn't change ever btw). I thought whatever, works for me, doesn't need to be on the repo and "I got mine". I have since seen 3 people asking if the hardware is supported / asking for it to be implemented. Oh well.
In that case I'd point them to your fork with a link to the PR where they maintainer chose not to include it.
Why? To start problems for me from pissy maintainers when I need help with something?
Man where are all you people? I've been asking for more python contributors for years now and we're very welcoming I'd like to think
We really do need some website to easily find projects that people want help on; projects that one can simply jump in on to translate a few strings for example, or fix a small bug that also needs some unit tests added to it that the maintainer hasn't had time to do.
It would also be nice to be able to see the average response time for PRs, the amount of documentation, and "average time to get up and running". Too many times have I seen a "good for beginners" or something tag on github but the project is a nightmare to setup. PHP and C/C++ projects are especially bad. They just assume everybody knows how to get started or have a "this works on my machine" setup, which doesn't work for anybody else but the maintainers and core contributors. I don't want to waste my time with:
- hours figuring out how to setup the project
- waiting weeks or months for feedback on a supposedly "easy" PR
- get extremely pedantic reviews like "a space is missing" or "a new line before this function" or "this is a method, not a function"