While I don’t disagree with this post in spirit, it feels tone deaf. Many very popular and well used FOSS projects rely on one or two core contributors who are volunteering their time to build something useful, fitting that work in alongside their paying work and the rest of their life. If a maintainer of a project I use has 3 hours in between their kid’s baseball game and dinner one Sunday to spend working on it, I’d much rather them spend that time making the project better than on giving pro forma replies to PRs and issues that aren’t valuable to the project to adhere to some sense of decorum (and, as a former maintainer, even a polite “no” to a bad idea or a disguised request for free technical consulting is time consuming).

As a tangent,

Not acknowledging contributions and the work that goes into them, whether through a quick response or a kind word, undermines our entire community. Every time that happens, it’s a “fuck you” towards a contributor. That seems fashionable if we look at the wider society—things are falling apart around us as we burn the planet and let nations get away with exploitation and murder—, but that doesn’t make it acceptable.

is kind of a wild connection to draw given the reality of many (most, I’d argue) FOSS projects. A busy single maintainer prioritizing their limited time by ignoring low effort contributions is in no way like burning the planet.

(maybe the author is implicitly thinking of very large, well resourced projects with sustaining funding and a lot of maintainers, where I think a higher standard might be fair. That’s not really clear from the post, though, and I don’t think it’s accurate to regard those as “the community”, in the same way that we don’t regard Google, Amazon, etc as the entire software industry)

I quite strongly disagree with this post.

Here’s the point: If you can’t handle contributions to your open-source project, then maybe just make it closed source. Leave the developer community alone rather than poison it.

No. They have given us a gift. Even if they just give a single tarball and nothing more, they have increased the total value in the world, not poisoned it. If you don’t like it, then walk away yourself. No-one is forcing you to interact with this project, no-one is forcing you to use it. Go associate with other projects that share your values, but don’t push away people who are sharing something freely and improving the total value in the world.

What you are doing is saying to someone, who is already giving you a gift, “that’s not enough, I want more. And if you’re not going to give me more, you should stop giving gifts to anyone at all”.

The inherent disrespect is extremely corrosive—there seems to be no sense of the time that goes into providing issue reports and PRs. That includes the bad ones—and the AI ones.

So maintainers should have to dedicate their free time and energy (often more time and energy than it took for the other person to raise the issue report) to something they don’t want to do and will make them more burned out? The author acknowledges they’re volunteers, but doesn’t seem to have really internalised what that means. And so they are saying “they should spend their free time doing what I want them to do”.

Yet if you want to be part of the open-source community, then start with manners. Treat your contributors with respect and gratitude. Go out of your way to handle issues.

If you want to be part of the open-source community, accept that some people have different priorities than you, and that no-one in this space owes each other anything. As I say, they have already given you a gift. Is that not enough?

Ok. Now I’ve calmed down a bit, I can meet the author halfway. I think that a lot of projects could do a better job of communicating what their boundaries and expectations are. If projects were more upfront and extremely clear about what level of support they were willing to provide (like SQLite), that could only be a good thing. That way, no-one would waste time contributing to a project in ways that the maintainers have made clear they don’t want to accept, and it would prevent misunderstandings like this.

I get that it feels bad to spend time on a contribution and then see nothing come of it. It feels like you are left hanging and I empathise. But even if your contribution is not accepted into the original project, you’ve still offered something by making it public. Other people can pick that up in their forks if they want to. And if you discover that it’s important to you to be in a community who quickly reviews your contributions, then you now know to choose a different project to contribute to, or to start your own.

1. We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions.
2. One would do well to test the waters before jumping in.
3. Our choice investments do not entitle us to returns of equal or higher value.