I have only ever released one open source project into the wild, a Wordpress plugin for multi-page posts, and that was a long time ago. But I recognize all the challenges Dave Rupert identifies in this post and they are enough to make me think twice about embarking on another open source endeavor:
…the issues started pouring in; the surprise refactors, the undiscussed feature drops, the commit stat beefers, the good ideas I don’t have time for, the bad ideas I don’t know how to say “no” to, and the endless “this doesn’t work and you’re a bad human” support requests.
His suggestion:
I sometimes wonder why a company like GitHub doesn’t offer educational, financial, or organizational support to maintainers. There’s plenty of write-ups on GitHub about how to start a new open source project, or how to add tooling, but almost no information or best practices on how to maintain a project over years. I think there’s a big education gap and opportunity here.
I’d read it!
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