My FOSS Story
I came across one of burntsushi's interactions on reddit that's still on my mind. A poster made an unfounded comment, based on their feelings, that a competing tool was faster than ripgrep and when the author rightfully called them out on the improper metrics of said claim and even took the time to explain the unfortunate effects of such claims, they simply responded that they would now flat out drop ripgrep completely. I can only imagine how exasperating multiple interactions of that "drive-by low-effort nature" must make one feel. How does one even respond to comments like that!
If you are reading this burntsushi, I'm really thankful for ripgrep, a tool I use tons of times almost everyday, as a backend for fzf etc. Definitely a happy user!
By no means a summary of the article, but I liked these passages in particular:
On emotions:
> When I was a young adult, I'd pride myself on being “logical” and “free of emotional decision making.” Like all good lies we tell to ourselves, there's a kernel of truth to it. But for the most part, at least for me personally, I am a deeply emotional being.
> Emotions run deep and can be a really useful well to tap for intrinsic motivation. For example, for some time after ripgrep was released, I began to immediately hate touching the code that was responsible for printing search results. It was convoluted, buggy and difficult to change. While rewriting is a perfectly logical decision to make on purely technical grounds only, I was motivated to do it because I didn't like the way it made me feel. My emotion helped drive me to make things better for myself.
On communicating thoughtfully in order to communicate effectively:
> ...being thoughtful in one's communication is important to advance your cause. If you're thoughtless, even if you're correct, you risk working against your own ends because the person on the other end might not be able to look past your thoughtlessness.
On the fact that even the author can't and doesn't read every line of every dependency they pull in:
> ...As someone who uses FOSS and tries hard to be discriminating with the dependencies I use, it is just not possible for me to review every line of code I depend on. Even if I could somehow manage to read it all, I certainly wouldn't be able to understand it all in enough detail to be confident that it was doing what I thought it was doing.
As someone who worked on a sizeable open source project, I sympathize with all of this. For me, part of growing as a person and making my own life easier were two things. First, to not hold everyone else to your own standards. That is, don't expect anything from anyone. Life gets a lot less disappointing that way. The other is to stop dwelling on what other people think. This one is hard, but if you can truly get there life gets a lot less stressing, programming included - you don't take such offense to the trolls. I think it's an unspoken part of aging and learning. You rarely see a shy old guy in the locker rooms.
All that said, as a complete aside, I have tremendous respect for Mr Gallant. Everything he writes is gold, and if you haven't yet, I'd recommend taking a look at his awesome open source projects.
When reading articles like these I am mostly surprised, because my experience with FOSS has been largely different. I maintain a few semi-popular libraries like shortuuid and catt, but users have always been helpful and courteous, the pull requests have always had the best interests of the library in mind and the users were open to feedback, and the worst I've gotten was users politely asking for support with their particular setup, to which I politely reply that I unfortunately don't have enough time to debug things outside the scope of the code and that's that.
Has anyone else had this experience? Maybe the trouble comes with libraries as popular as ripgrep, or maybe it comes more often to a specific type of person. I'm generally not very patient, so I'd expect to have much more trouble than other maintainers, but I'm also just not negatively affected by bugs and PRs at all. People filing them have taken their time to do it, which means my code is important enough to them to spend time improving it, and bugs happen, so I take bug reports as compliments rather than as personal failures.
Hopefully someone else has the same experience as me, and maybe we can figure out how to generalize that experience for others.
I think the author is on the right track with his section on Setting Boundaries.
Personally, by the time I release something as open source, it is Finished. That is, it's feature complete and working to my satisfaction, and as far as I'm concerned probably won't need much in the way of improvement going forward.
So while I do occasionally get feedback from people using it, there's never any pressing need for me to do anything about it. There have been a handful of genuine bugs over the years, but mostly it's requests for features that I don't need, and therefore probably won't add.
Occasionally somebody will go as far as adding one of those features themselves, including a patch or PR with the addition. Thus far, all of those cases have been for stuff I hadn't personally seen as necessary, so my only response is to politely decline and suggest the author forks off his own version if he wants to publish that change.
My philosophy, in short, is that the code I release is out there to use if you want. But it's not something that needs "maintenance". It's Finished.
I wish there was a well-understood convention to opt out of "social coding". A way to put up a project under an open source license (or CC0/public-domain) along with a notice that says effectively, "feel free to fork, but don't file issues or submit patches."
You can put that in a README, but people won't read it. Github won't let you disable i̶s̶s̶u̶e̶s̶ ̶l̶a̶s̶t̶ ̶I̶ ̶l̶o̶o̶k̶e̶d̶ pull requests, unless you archive the project (making it read-only). Is it possible on one of the other hosting services, like Gitlab?
We need better ways to draw boundaries around open source projects and contributors.
ETA: How can we counter the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
> When I was a young adult, I'd pride myself on being “logical” and “free of emotional decision making.” Like all good lies we tell to ourselves, there's a kernel of truth to it. But for the most part, at least for me personally, I am a deeply emotional being.
I’ve seen this in quite a few people, both online and in the real world – people that think they are all about logic and not about emotions. And in each and every case, I believe they are only fooling themselves in thinking so. Emotions are really powerful and they affect us all in far more ways than a lot of people like to admit.
Love, hate, jealousy, insecurity, and the list goes on.
People are really good at rationalizing their feelings though, so it is easy to get fooled into thinking that a decision or stance we took was based in some objective truth when in reality emotions were steering us.
Yet so many people refuse to accept that this is the case for them just like it is for everyone else. Even though it is blatantly clear to a lot of people around them when they are acting as they do because of emotions.
I think the world would be a better place if everyone admitted to themselves that emotions is a part of our nature. Then perhaps more people would be able to handle their own emotions better, and we would all, including themselves, be better off.
I certainly try to listen to my emotions and to understand how they effect me.
This is a really good article.
One thing that I found surprising was that the author considered comments along the lines of "Just chiming in to say that I would also really like this feature." to be rude. I would have thought it was helpful feedback; more people indicating the value of a feature seems helpful in assessing whether it's worth doing (if it's not obvious for other reasons).
This is a great article. I respect every FOSS maintainer for what they're doing and am saddened by the bs I often see them deal with. The article is balanced in describing different reasons for coming off rude--as a non-native speaker of English I've been rude without meaning to, for example. But even if the intentions weren't bad per se, these interactions are an unnecessary burden to the maintainer.
So to reiterate: any bug report or pull request that isn't good will waste the maintainer's time and effort. I wonder if the community could address that. I mean, most anyone could screen issues for tone and the effort taken. We could have a group of volunteers that tag issues worthy of the maintainer's time and explain to reporters how they should improve. That would be a valuable contribution to FOSS.
Setting up the system to do this is not trivial, however. Ideally I'd love to just tag my repos for issue review. I'd wish for the reviewers to be trustworthy. And as a volunteer reviewer I'd want a queue of issues to review, and I'd require some compensation (e.g. a profile page showing how helpful I've been).
I guess the feasibility of this idea comes down to the availability of volunteers. What do you people think?
PS. Burntsushi, if you're reading this, huge thanks for your great software. You're one of the people whose contributions I appreciate the most in FOSS.
There's a reasonable amount of FOSS developers here, so let me ask a question.
Often times I'll run across a FOSS project that claims to solve a problem I have, encounter a bug that makes the project useless for my purposes, and discover that said bug has had an open entry in the issue tracker for years. This even occurs in major FOSS software with paid developers working on it.
Clearly no one actually cares about the bug, and "chiming in" is apparently considered rude. So I ignore your software and move on. Whatever, you don't owe me anything.
Then some day I respond to a forum post by someone asking about experiences with your software, and relate mine. Apparently this is also rude, and I should have filed a bug report.
I guess my question is: is there any scenario under which one can actually provide feedback other than praise that you will accept?
> For me personally, this is an area where I struggle the most. My emotions get the best of me, because all I can think is: why didn't this person take the time to read and fill out the issue template? Or, in cases where bugs are user errors that could be resolved by just reading the documentation, all I can think of is: I spent this time gifting this user some software, but they can't even read the README before filing a bug report?
This resonates so much. Users who blatantly waste your time despite multiple cues steering them towards actionable bug reports are worse then trolls or haters IMO. (I use issue templates, with all caps and explosive emojis, and I even put specific actionable wiki links in error messages, but some people still insist on opening barebones “doesn’t work” bug reports. Or duplicates. People open duplicates when there are like three open issues in total and one is clearly the same issue as theirs. What the hell?)
With trolls or haters you can simply drop the ban hammer, easy. With this kind of high-maintenance users, it’s hard to decide whether you should waste time helping them, or simply refuse action until they get their act together.
> It can be maddening. But that's emotions for you. They certainly aren't always rational. The documentation could probably be clearer. Or the user could have just missed that part of the documentation. Or the user doesn't have experience maintaining FOSS projects or filing bug reports and maybe does not know how to provide an easy reproduction. These are all perfectly reasonable things to have happen, and it's why I do my best not to let my emotions get the best of me. While the way I feel is important, empathizing with the person on the other end of the wire is important too.
Honestly it’s hard to empathize with users who can’t follow “run command with --debug, post entire output” or who don’t bother to read anything when the error message clearly says “here’s a wiki article for your specific error, read it before reporting a bug”.
Ripgrep is a work of art and like every work of art it will find critics that dislike it for not fitting their own mind.
burntsushi is one of these people in open source that we would need more of — both because of the quality of his work and the positive and grown way he interacts with the world.
If you read this: thank you for the incredible effort, switching to your software was a complete no-brainer as it is well documented and works — and before this creates pressure: it certainly will not get any worse. Work at your own pace.
What a phenomenal article. It's shocking how entitled people get about 100% free software. Some really emotionally intelligent insights here.
I used to maintain a fairly popular and important open source project and I can definitely empathize with lots of what Andrew has written.
What always fascinated me is just how much the form of a request impacted the probability that I would spend energy to help. Someone who submits a polite and well thought-out bug report just makes you want to help them. OTOH someone writing "Hey when will you fix your stupid bug? My startup has already lost $XXX in revenue because of you" just fills you with schadenfreude and makes you want to troll that person, even if the request is essentially the same in both cases. Some users just don't understand how much they undermine their requests. This kind of attitude may work if you are a boss or a customer, but open source runs on common courtesy.
One bit of the article that I disagreed with is classifying "Just chiming in to say that I would also really like this feature" as rude. Yes, it is passive aggression, but it is better than active aggression and still provides a bit of valuable information. Open source at its best is like a swarm of locusts devouring the problem domain and for this to work information must flow from users back to developers.
Oh, and thanks for your open source work, burntsushi!
Just like the author of actix-web decides to exit from his popular Rust open source project recently(https://github.com/actix/actix-web). As a maintainer of large open source project is not a fun task. whatever mental or physical, it's really a hard job.
Respent for every maintainer and contributor, it's not easy. You can read some issues in the repository, the authors of some issues are just complaining or criticizing the idea or bug, it's unfair and rude. in the end, hurt maintainer's passions. Every developer should know it and respect it like the README or guideline before posting issues or comments.
It's a fantastic post about the analysis of OSS maintainer, Respect for Mr. Gallant.
> I taught myself to set boundaries: it's okay to say no to a feature solely on the grounds that you don't want the added maintenance that comes from it.
This makes perfect sense. The author seems to understand well that there's a balance to be struck when working on OSS; you can't always work only on the stuff you want to work on. On the other hand, being the one who initiates and maintains some FOSS has to mean something. If it doesn't mean you get to decide (within reason) on somewhat subjective calls such as "is this feature worth implementing when weighed against the maintenance burden?" then contributing and maintaining OSS ends up meaning nothing other than willingly doing work for free and letting everyone else in the world be your boss. Clearly that's an untenable situation.
> why didn't this person take the time to read and fill
> out the issue template?
Really? I'm thankful when people just report bugs, rather than ignoring them. Assuming they're actual bugs. I can always ask them for details and wait until they give them.
I feel like I've been saved the embarrassment of the bug continuing to live on in the code.
> Or, in cases where bugs are user errors that could be
> resolved by just reading the documentation, all I can
> think of is: I spent this time gifting this user some
> software, but they can't even read the README before
> filing a bug report?
For me, I'm frustrated that the UI and documentation are not clear enough, or not attractive enough, to ensure everybody reads them and abides by them. I mean, for me it's an imperfection on my part, or perhaps "basic human nature".
What I'm most frustrated about is when people can invest the time and effort to write long bug reports without realizing that the behavior they're seeing is not a bug at all.
Another source of frustration is bugs which are not mine, but affect the behavior of my software, and which I can mostly do nothing about.
As somebody who works with data a lot, the need for analysing and transforming CSV files comes up and I recall, how I needed something fast. Then I discovered `xsv` about a year ago, and since then I still use it on a weekly basis. since then also discovered ripgrep.
It was also for me a gateway in the sense I see rust come up on HN, but only when I started using these tools I realised how fast and light those little apps can be. It made me want to learn Rust and seeing the community around it I realise, it is a very wonderful thing.
I think there might be value in creating a “Maintainer’s Cookbook” of socially appropriate phrases that they can use to decline interest in feature requests, technical support, pull requests, bug reports, etc.
“That looks like an excellent feature! Good work, thanks for showing it to me :)” [pull request closed]
“I’m sorry to hear that it’s not working out for you. If you’re able to work out what went wrong, feel free to post an update.” [closes issue]
“That’s an unfortunate flaw to have encountered. It doesn’t come up in my usage, but I agree with your diagnosis. If you end up fixing it in your own fork, please do mention this issue.” [closes issue]
And an accompanying “Open source user guide” that covers the basics (much of which I don’t know today)
“How to fork, repackage, and replace an upstream Node dependency when you’re trying to fix a bug”
“When is it appropriate to submit an issue/feature/pull request?”
“How do I upvote something I want to see an open source author do for me?”
etc.
I can fully sympathize with this. We have an open-source app on Google play, and the amount of dirt flying at us from users is astounding. What makes matters more funny, app is a client, so most of the problem are related to improperly configured servers. Also, since Google play allows users to leave ratings, every jerk feels entitled to award you 1/5 rating for every minor glitch he experiences.
We have learned to ignore this, and adopted a policy that we just don't care about ratings. If the user is asking for help in a polite way, we help him however we can, for free. If he is an entitled jerk, we just mock him for being entitled.
Of course, then some start ranting how immature our behavior is are and how we must learn to treat our 'customers' better. Of course, right.
It's an unusual comparison, but this New Yorker story about a Buddhist monk maintaining the equivalent of a suicide hotline in Japan struck me as one of the best things I've read about the difficulty of being a maintainer: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/24/last-call-3
I own a couple or FOSS repos myself, and after some years I tearnt to classify my projects into two categories:
ego-boosting: projects I don't care much and that I give away just because I enjoy making them and increment my selfish ego-feelings when someone uses it.
work: a project that has a specific work purpose or is the base or core product and that I want the users to adopt it.
Now, I hope the following isn't too rude, but it's the way I developed a thick skin, and also how I think about it when trolls and haters come around my projects: being a repo maintainer gives you a (small) position of power (take it easy, you are not Torvalds!). That is, when someone downloads or uses your project, is that someone that came to you and not the way around; when shitposting in some forum happens, it's them talking about you and not the way around. When there is a rude request of some type, it's them needing you and not the way around.
When someone comes with "you should X...", my toughs are "yes, I should because, instead of being completely useless about it, I'm the only one who can do something about it".
Of course, the above applies to the ego-boosting kind of projects more than to the work ones (since I want adopters coming and staying around, I can be more flexible).
If the request or critique comes from well educated, patient users, then obviously the above doesn't apply and the support/request goes through smoothly.
If the critique comes from a peer maintainer or someone you esteem, then the situation could be different (and happened a few times to me, and I can't remember how I felt).
That’s a fabulously well-written article: very insightful and demonstrating remarkable self-awareness. It inspired me to check out the README for ripgrep and I was equally impressed with the quality of its documentation.
Until now, I’ve always shied away from any of the modern `grep`-like programs as I prefer to be comfortable with the standardised utilities as specified by POSIX (`find` and `grep`). However, I often find myself using GNU extensions – since they’re so useful and make certain tasks easier. I figured today would be a good day to take it a step further and try out `ripgrep`. One feature that immediately appeals to me is that `rg` automatically respects `.gitignore` and skips hidden files/directories and binary files; When searching recursively, I pretty much always use `-I` with GNU grep and often use its `--exclude` and `--exclude-dir` options (features not specified by POSIX). I’m looking forward to experimenting with ripgrep and discovering what other benefits it can offer.
So thanks, Burntsushi/Andrew.
Burntsushi, as part of the mostly silent crowd I also want to share, for once, how much I learned from reading some of your code, mostly in the rust regex crate. Amazing work, truly inspiring.
As someone with a footprint in open source, I agree that giving labor for free sets an expectation.
That said, I never had the request to rewrite in a different programming language, yet. Downstream library users as well as package maintainers seem delighted with Python.
I think GitHub sponsors and patreon-like systems can be the way forward. If open source users said "hey, I'll give (10/20/50/whatevers affordable to me now) bucks a month toward open source projects" and then proportion them across projects they choose, that can go forward to things.
But open source is much bigger than projects themselves. One example would be package maintainers on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, BSD port systems, and so on. They put enough time into it they should be compensated.
I think with these new platforms like GH Sponsors, we're on a trajectory toward fixing this.
> I got a drive-by comment effectively telling me to use a “working” license instead, along with some (what felt like) condescending lecture on how licensing works.
I hope my many drive-by github issues on licenses over the years weren't taken as condescending. I want to avoid the headache in the future of a migration, an example of what it can entail: https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/2054
That's a lot of work.
Worse is the matter of ambiguity with certain licenses. Having something clear and simple that'll work across jurisdictions is a winner.
Wishful thinking or intent doesn't matter when the door is left open for a legal adversary different interpretation of the facts, then having to pay expenses to defend it. That's drama in and of itself, but could also really hurt a business, esp. in early phases.
I have mad respect for Andrew (burntsushi). I use ripgrep everyday. Thank you for the awesome tool. Anyone who uses VSCode also uses it since it powers the underlying search.
I made some issues asking for some enhancements and was kindly denied. I like this. It tells me the project is focused. Well I liked it because I got a proper response within 48 hours. Most projects just have things laying there forever.
Andrew, if you’re reading this. How do you manage your time to get so much time to write OS code? Also how do you make enough money to be sustainable ?
What a great article.
I'm a happy ripgrep user. I'm impressed by its speed, its ease of use, and the positive vibe on the issue tracker. Naturally, I never reached out to burntsushi -- I don't have anything to complain about!
> When I was a young adult, I'd pride myself on being “logical” and “free of emotional decision making.” Like all good lies we tell to ourselves, there's a kernel of truth to it. But for the most part, at least for me personally, I am a deeply emotional being.
I wonder if this is in part related to getting older. When I was younger, I was into being logical myself. But as best I can tell, that was true for myself back then: I cared about work progressing effectively, and in my mind the best to achieve that was through direct, blunt communication. When I was on the receiving end of that, I was happy about it. Now that I'm older and have kids, I do think a lot more about how to say things. It does make working with people who are exactly like I was a bit slower, but it increases the pool of people I can collaborate with. So it's worth it (...I tell myself).
> Rudeness, on the other hand, comes in all shapes and sizes: “Just chiming in to say that I would also really like this feature.”
This is a great example. From the side of the person leaving this comment, it feels so innocuous! "I'm just saying I'd like this too. Ignore me if you want, I'm just adding a harmless data point." But from the side of the person who's getting tens of these messages, it feels so very draining.
Andrew, if you're reading this! I use ripgrep every single day and it has never failed me. Thank you for all your hard work! It's nothing short of incredible.
Regards, A very happy user
Communicating expectations / setting boundaries feels key to avoiding negativity on both sides.
I recently read an article titled "Healthy Open Source Maintenance"[1], which proposed the introduction of a MAINTENANCE_MANIFESTO.md, meant to communicate expectations.
Quoting the fun part:
"Even though this idea is still in early stages, for the sake of clarity, this is what a selection of manifestos could look like:
- The sponsor me to get priority on your bug fix manifesto.
- The this is free goods and service, so you get what you get manifesto.
- The micro-donations to keep the project alive, but I decide what to work on manifesto.
- The hire the agency I work for to sponsor features manifesto.
…
The presence of the Healthy Maintainer Manifesto will be a tool to deflect social pressure. This will help maintainers that suffer from avoidance anxiety because they are not obligated to pay the maintenance taxes. Their manifesto says so! If any demanding user wants to pressure them into doing anything in particular, they can point them to the manifesto. The manifesto replaces complicated social interactions with a discharge form. The goal of this is to protect the maintainer, because, after all, maintainers are the cornerstone of open source—and thus all the software industry. And because we all prefer a community where maintainers are happy, and not at the brink of burnout."
[1] https://www.lullabot.com/articles/healthy-open-source-mainte...
Dear BurntSushi, thank you for your hard work and ripgrep which I use on a daily basis. Ignore the trolls and dismiss the people that take more than they give.
These issues aren't specific to FOSS, just ask Shareware authors or website maintainers. From personal experience and other such stories, I suspect they are also more frustrating if one's motives aren't exclusively altruistic or professional, i.e. if one craves the attention a little too much. The whole FOSS scene seems to me to be too much about other issues than quality software lately (10-15 years or so).
I think offering only a bug tracker and no forum can contribute to some of these problems.
I only create an issue in a bug tracker for bugs or change request. The interaction feels impersonal.
On the other hand with a forum you get more of a community feel. There might be a subforum for writing about your experience with the software (so you get positive feedback) and one where users help each other, with the maintainer only chiming in occasionally.
Andrew (burntsushi) is a tech leader. He's got a huge heart and a whole lot of grit. I see him enduring as a high-profile open source project author. How many battles a day does one accept before reprioritizing life decisions? One too many strained interactions takes a toll on anyone. No matter how much grit someone has, everyone has a limit defining how much is worth enduring.
Andrew should not have to deflect burning arrows fired in his direction on a regular basis, and when they are fired he needs be able to cut them down before they make a mark. Further, while he has developed the required skills, his counterparts haven't. I remember an interaction I had with Andrew where he mistook something I said as a flaming arrow and acted accordingly. Realizing this, I immediately considered how what I said could be misinterpreted and did not take offense to his reaction. His situation is far different from mine and he's fighting battles I can only imagine.
For his sake, and that of others, there needs to be a concerted effort to address the difficulties that open source authors are dealing with. In an organization, an employer facilitates various types of training to help employees navigate challenging situations. Ethics and professional conduct are learned, as well as conflict resolution. I've taken such training a number of times and continue to learn from them. There is a huge chasm between knowing and doing, though, so hands-on training is required to internalize these skills.
I propose a concerted effort to provide "soft skill" training for the technology community. Users and authors of open source will benefit. I realize that this alone will be insufficient but it is one concrete step that can be taken in the immediate future to begin to address challenges that many people are having.
@burntsushi I use ripgrep all the time. I was also able to learn how to go from 0 to release just by reading through your codebase and documentation to see what goes into a release. When I was writing my foss project I asked myself wwbsd (what would burntsushi do). Even stumbled onto how to create and maintain a homebrew tap thanks to you. I appreciate you and the work you put out, thanks!
I see that ripgrep is dual license by MIT license and the Unlicense. I suppose that might be a reasonable way to do it. All of my software is I release it as public domain, but maybe the dual license might help. A variant I have seen is a program that uses MIT license, but it also says that any Discordian pope (which is anyone) is allowed to grant themself a license to use it by WTFPL (which effectively makes it as public domain, even if it isn't).
Free time is unscheduled is I think reasonable and it make sense. But also you might have nothing to change for some time, so until then there would not have any next release.
I write many programs too, but rarely get any comments, whether positive or negative or neutral. (One exception is my "bystand" NNTP client; I have received a patch to make it work on BSD, and some bug fixes, which I have accepted.)
And to write a FAQ document, I think you would need to know the questions.
> But as anyone who has been a FOSS maintainer can attest, positive comments are almost always dwarfed by negative comments.
This sounds really weird to me. It's not the first time it's been said either, but my experiences being a FOSS maintainer (for some reasonably popular projects) aren't at all dwarfed by negative comments. In my experiences, the comments are almost universally along the lines of "How do I do X?" and "Thanks!".
Thinking it over, there have been 2 instances I'd consider rude in the last few years. One was just... someone being overly demanding, the other was (I think) just a young person not used to being told No. ;)
Nothing else negative comes to mind.
My point is that being an OSS maintainer isn't automatically something like the author describes. Some Communities are nice, and the people help each other out authentically. :)
Thanks burntsushi for this and all your work on FOSS. There's one thing that I'd be interested to hear about that's not in the blog post -- stuff to do with how your FOSS involvement and your professional life impact each other. Ultimately it's zero-sum: 24hrs in a day. Do you often find you much prefer working on your side-projects than on your day job? Do you think you'd be a more productive / more engaged / deeper contributor in your day job if it weren't for the side projects? Or is it more that your love of software would suffer if it weren't for the side projects and hence you'd actually be a worse employee? Perhaps those three sentences are bit facile, but hopefully the question is clear.
While I highly appreciate the contribution Burnt Sushi made, I've personally gone through a not so great experience contributing to one of Burnt Sushi's repositories.
I personally think a major issue is he may have over-stretched in terms of the repos he sought to create and support as a maintainer. He has 140 public repos many of them significant. As his interests, shifted I have experienced that the pace of reviewing and responding to comments and pull requests became really slow and ultimately led to frustration among contributors as well.
Might have been better to clearly prioritize and state which repositories he planned to support and which not and possibly either hand over ownership or mark the repo he didn't intend to support as orphaned.
Could I use this opportunity to ask a more general question: What are your incentives and goals when creating and maintaining open source projects? I appreciate this sounds a little disillusioned, but after creating a number of reasonably succesful projects (http://golden-layout.com/, https://deepstream.io/, earlier https://wolframhempel.github.io/photobooth-js/) and I still can't find a fully satisfying answer.
It should be possible to block people on Gh in the same way blocking on Twitter works. So they can't access your repos anymore when logged in. That would help a lot of the rude people to learn.
> But other projects begin to pile up with issues and pull requests. The inbox gets longer. Each day you see a new issue come in, and you say to yourself, “yes, I will really look at it this time once I get home from work.” But more just keep coming in. Eventually you work up the motivation to context switch back into that project because That User has pinged you once a month for four months and their pull request is probably Really Important.
That's my software development experience in a nutshell.
In my experience the bug tracker is always full of reports that are ignored or forgotten. Even a closed project with dedicated staff and limits on who can file bugs, it's unlikely that all bugs get triaged much less resolved..
In big projects, it's less problematic because it's never your failure, it's the entire teams failure :)
But this idea that you can respond to all issues won't scale very far.
As the author says we need to set boundaries. Maybe sometimes we're too nice in trying to respond to all bugs...
> There is no legal relationship here. There is nothing in my licenses that say I ought or have to do this. At least for me, it's an implied agreement among humans acting in good faith.
It's important to remember this. Many developers maintain software because they personally care about the projects, not because they have customers. They can always just drop everything and let the community deal with it, no questions asked.
For awesome FOSS projects, like ripgrep, I wish there was a way to donate praise or goodwill, in addition to donating money. In other words, people can write in a special area dedicated to words of appreciation and gratitude. All those FOSS maintainers need to know just how much positivity there is.
Obviously it won't fix the damage of those who are rude or entitled, but perhaps it'll help provide a boost.
When a project reaches a certain level of activity, maybe the solution is to find people to help with e.g. triaging issue. It seems a waste that the core maintainer is having to back-and-forth with people to get them to fill out the bug reports fully; and willing contributor could probably do that without needing core-dev expertise.
This post reminds me very much of my own writing last year where I covered several of the same topics, https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/
Hope this also resonates with you Andrew.
I appreciate the author's self-knowledge and honesty, as well as the quality software.
My own motivations in open source have been a bit different (and sometimes conflicted), and my experiences and perceptions also a bit different, but a lot is the same.
Great post, just keep doing what you're doing! I, for one, have a ton of respect for the work that you do and the projects that you've created. I've never been the steward of a super popular project, but I can imagine it must be demanding.
Just here to add the chorus of ripgrep fans. Was initially skeptical that it'd be worth switching from the extremely available and basically functional find / xargs, but having switched I absolutely wouldn't want to be without rg.
Being a maintainer means that you often have to deal with things when they go wrong. This can lead to the wrong perception that everyone dislikes you and your software while in fact it's the opposite.
I, for one, when I read burtnshushi's blog on its design, I switched to rg and never looked back (had used pt, ag, and grep in that order before).
And xsv has been a standard work tool.
In terms of a practical takeaway, how much would FOSS maintainer's lives be improved if you could actually require a runnable example before filing a bug?
(wanna be, old man Rust hacker here)
If I *EVER* write a piece of code that's .1% as good as RipGrep, I'll feel like a damned Superstar.I've never heard of an AGPL project being beset by entitled leechers... granted the license doesn't really matter with end-user applications.
Your `xgb` and `xgbutil` libraries did exactly what I needed, and helped me write a nifty little window management utility for myself. Thanks!
It’s quite a tome, and I’m glad to see a lot of these topics covered. Not sure how many folks will read it, though.
I too, tend towards “prolix” (you can see that in my HN comments), and have often been told “TL;DR.”
I’ve been writing FOSS stuff for a couple of decades, and can relate to pretty much all of it.
But I keep writing it. No intention to stop.
I tend to write for a pretty tough crowd. It’s helped me to get comfortable with the fact that I only do this for my own reasons, and I’m glad to help others, but I don’t need their approval.
I write Swift code, these days. Has some similarities to Rust.
A great read, thanks!
I use ripgrep and xsv daily at work - thank you Andrew aka burntsushi for sharing your code!
Lesson (not?) learnt: choose your audience. Choose what crowd you want to hang out with.
> How much time did that user just waste because of the bug?
I've run my fair share of OSS over the years and had negative comments, rude bug reports, unconstructive API complaints etc. At my feelings about this specifically have evolved to: Fuck 'em it's free.
A consummate professional.
This resonates with me on every level. Great article.
the standard response to every unhelpful communication to a FOSS project should be either silence or a "Fk Off".
Relevant: https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
This is pretty much Rust Action Task Force now (which has no programmers)
I don't really understand why anyone would do FOSS, beyond the ideological. Most of the problems of this person come from the fact that he has no financial incentive / means to quit his current job and focus on / grow his project. I feel like I read this exact same story from different people each month of HN.
Burntsushi, Andrew. My man. You don't know me, we have never talked but bro I admire the shit out of you.
Trolls are much louder than lurkers. There are a silent majority of us that know how much time and sweat goes into building free tools. We appreciate what you do because you do it for love of being a hacker and showing everyone else how you did it.
I don't think people realize how hard it is having a day job and then building a huge project people want to use. It's mentally taxing. It sucks even more when it's only negative things. Life is already hard man, why do these people have to keep trolling you? It's enough to make you want to flip the desk and give it all up.
I love reading your Rust code, and seeing how active you are on reddit/hacker news. Going through how you built the Aho Corasick crate and comments on you trying to reverse hyperscans teddy algo. was amazing for me. I spent so many hours that day reading ripgrep source code. I was amazed and what you did and the comments everywhere about why, like why the printer was pull/push. The whole time, I was geeking over what you did so much that you started my love of Rust.
Anyways, thanks for just being you man.