Comment by msm_
1 year ago
Author addresses this at the beginning, but I disagree with them:
>This means that even if a single person wrote every line of code of a language's compiler themselves, when it comes to thinking about the project, they need to think of themselves as stewards and not owners
I respect the author if they believe this and stick to it (they are involved in OS too), but for the rest of us this is a sure way to burn out.
If you don't want to be a steward of an open technology, why on earth would you become an open-source maintainer?
Almost nobody knows what it's like to maintain a popular project until they do it.
It's very hard to not spend all of your time managing people.
We like think that even responding to issues and pull requests are "just code", but they are actually people problems. You're managing people.
For example, this person spent a week on this pull request, but it wasn't something you wanted to be done, and they didn't do it the way that it should have been done. What do you tell them and how do you tell them? Now let's say they are a vocal person in your tiny ecosystem. It's not easy.
And a lot of the ecosystem you get is pure luck of the draw. Since ecosystems self-select (people who don't fit in in certain ways move on) you can get dynamics that really have nothing to do with you, whether you had zero presence or were 100% prescriptive about how the ecosystem should work. It's kind a bizarre to see over time. (Message boards back in the day were a good example of this too)
It is just the same as any other organizational leader, if it's getting to be too much, get others to join in to lead, delegate tasks, and the last solution, allow others to take your place and leave the organization. Not everyone is cut out to be a leader and we should not waste everyone's time forcing or pretending that it were so.