Comment by nathell
2 months ago
Congratulations on forking!
Always remember that open-source is an author’s gift to the world, and the author doesn’t owe anything to anyone. Thus, if you need a feature that for whatever reason can’t or won’t go upstream, forking is just about the only viable option. Fingers crossed!
This is not merely open-source, but taking part in a huge package ecosystem in a foundational role in an XKCD 2347 type of way for HTTP requests.
Put your side project on your personal homepage and walk away - fine.
Make it central infrastructure - respond to participants or extend or cede maintainership.
If "taking part in a huge ecosystem in a foundational role" means 'other people choosing to use your FOSS software', and I can't think of what else it would mean, then no, you have no obligation to do any of that.
FOSS means the right to use and fork. That's all it means. That's all it ever meant. Any social expectations beyond that live entirely in your imagination.
I guess frustration speaks here?
There is simply no responsibility an OSS maintainer has. They can choose to be responsible, but no one can force them. Eventually OSS licensing is THE solution at heart to solve this problem. Maintainers go rogue? Fork and move on. But surprise, who is going to fork AND maintain? Filling in all the demands from the community, for potentially no benefit?
No one can force him to take the responsibility, just like no one can force anyone else to.
Right, frustration about the no strings attached sentiment for OSS devs. Of course you've no obligations for support or maintenance, but with increasing exposure responsibility grows as de facto ever more projects, people, softwares depend on you.
This doesn't come over night and this is a spectrum and a choice. From purely personal side project over exotic Debian package to friggin httpx with 15k Github stars and 100 million downloads a week the 46th most downloaded PyPI package!
If this shall work reasonably in any way, hou have to step up. Take money (as they do, https://github.com/sponsors/encode), search fellow maintainers or cede involvement - even if only temporarily.
An example of a recent, successful transition is UniGetUI https://github.com/Devolutions/UniGetUI/discussions/4444
I feel there should be support from the ecosystem to help with that. OpenJS Foundation seems doing great: https://openjsf.org/projects. The Python Software Foundation could not only host PyPI but offer assistance for the most important packages.
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No. Even if it’s a central piece of infrastructure, any and all maintainership effort is still a token of good will of the maintainer – and needs to be appreciated, rather than expected.
If you need stronger guarantees, pay someone to deliver them.
A foundational role in a huge open-source package ecosystem? I wonder what such an esteemed position pays.
A (hypothetical) professional propriety project at same scale would probably feed a handful of people, with much less stress. FOSS version is zero cash and exaggerated community demands. Dream job.