Gina Häußge

Welcome to the real world, where open source maintenance should be a lot of things but instead boils down to a whole lot of personal sacrifices by maintainers. I don’t like this either, and do what I can to improve it, but that’s a slow process. Idealism is nice, but it doesn’t help here.

And why do I do this to myself? Because I believe in open source and because I want people to have free access to good tooling. Currently I can afford to do this thanks to crowd funding of my work. I would never accept VC funding.

Kindly stop insinuating that I’m a turbo capitalist corporate drone, it’s insulting and absolutely ridiculous.

You misunderstood me. My reason isn’t “get more users”. My reason is “my day only has 24h and maintenance itself is a full time job, without adding on hosting, administration, etc for code repository or communication infrastructure”.

I have to choose my fights if I don’t want to burn out. I’ve been a full time maintainer for 10 years now, 8 of those self employed.

That being said, I do in fact self host a web forum for my project (which I can only do because I have a volunteer admin taking care of the day to day and a whole ton of mods helping with moderation), and I do have a nightly mirror of everything on the project’s GitHub org to my private NAS just in case.

I wish I could upvote you more than once.

It all really comes down to making choices that make the most use of the extremely limited resources (time, money, spoons) you have as a maintainer.