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“the lesson I'm choosing to take from xz, as an oss maintainer, is that anyone trying to pressure or guilt me into doing something should immediately be told no, for security reasons” (crabby.fyi)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 111 points 7 months ago (3 children)

In some open source projects there is a lot of leeching and little contributions.

In 2020 the sole developer of Invidious stepped away from development because of burn out. https://omar.yt/posts/stepping-away-from-open-source

Also in 2020 developer Raymond Hill archived the uMatrix browser add-on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532973

I will never hand over development to whoever, I had my lesson in the past -- I wouldn't like that someone would turn the project into something I never intended it to become (monetization, feature bloat, etc.). At most I would archive the project and whoever is free to fork under a new name. For now I resisted doing this, so people will have to be patient for new stable release.

What would actually help is that people help to completely investigate existing issues instead of keep asking me to add yet more features. Turns out people willing to step in the code to investigate and pinpoint exactly where is an issue (or that there is no issue) is incredibly rare.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 7 months ago

That last sentence rings true of most software engineers. Everyone wants to work on a glamorous new feature that's going to wow users or let them think about problems they want to think about. No-one wants to hunt down the difficult-to-repro bug in an old but critical section of someone else's code.

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