I'm glad to see this attitude expressed in the current sea of "reluctant maintainers". I don't really get why so many people get stuck maintaining a project when they don't want to maintain it. Just step away? If someone else wants to take it, they'll take it. If no one wants to take it, it'll just peacefully die, and that's fine.
Or if you want to run a project with no issue tracker, that's also fine. That's how most of the closed source Windows freeware programs were ran in the late 90s/early 2000s. Once it stops working for most people's use cases, people will just switch to something else. Granted, this model lends itself more to full products and not libraries or frameworks.
But if you want to become the "Hot New Framework", one of the ones that all the devs talk about, one that will be picked by teams across the world, with all of the clout, prestige, speaker invitations to conferences and whatnot that will get you, I'm sorry, you need to hold your end of the bargain. The mindshare doesn't come for free, if you get upset and take your ball home every time someone points out a bug in your code or requests a feature, the other kids will just stop playing with your (formerly) fancy ball. And as you found out, if people don't come with the right feedback and said feedback isn't taken seriously, your project's popularity will dwindle and perhaps even die altogether if the flaws or missing features are serious enough.
You'd think this much would be obvious, but the "Don't Talk to an OSS Maintainer Ever" doctrine keeps getting more and more popular and it's really bewildering. Being an OSS maintainer for a project out in the open means that your (volunteer) job is literally talking to people. Firemen may be volunteers in many regions, but if a random fireman randomly stopped putting out fires because "I don't owe you anything!", they'd be rightfully kicked out. Just because you're not getting paid, it doesn't mean you have no moral duty to anything in life.
RMS would famously shout "YOU are the GNU Hurd maintainer!" at people who asked him what GNU's plan for Hurd was. That obviously turned out great. It's a good attitude to have if you don't want anything to happen and just want to claim the moral high ground, it's not great if you want your project to be successful and it pains me that we're teaching people that it's ok to be unprofessional at volunteer jobs because you're volunteering.
> But if you want to become the "Hot New Framework", one of the ones that all the devs talk about, one that will be picked by teams across the world, with all of the clout, prestige, speaker invitations to conferences and whatnot that will get you, I'm sorry, you need to hold your end of the bargain.
This part goes without saying. If some maintainer does not want to do this, the framework will not become popular.
Or if you want to run a project with no issue tracker, that's also fine. That's how most of the closed source Windows freeware programs were ran in the late 90s/early 2000s. Once it stops working for most people's use cases, people will just switch to something else. Granted, this model lends itself more to full products and not libraries or frameworks.
But if you want to become the "Hot New Framework", one of the ones that all the devs talk about, one that will be picked by teams across the world, with all of the clout, prestige, speaker invitations to conferences and whatnot that will get you, I'm sorry, you need to hold your end of the bargain. The mindshare doesn't come for free, if you get upset and take your ball home every time someone points out a bug in your code or requests a feature, the other kids will just stop playing with your (formerly) fancy ball. And as you found out, if people don't come with the right feedback and said feedback isn't taken seriously, your project's popularity will dwindle and perhaps even die altogether if the flaws or missing features are serious enough.
You'd think this much would be obvious, but the "Don't Talk to an OSS Maintainer Ever" doctrine keeps getting more and more popular and it's really bewildering. Being an OSS maintainer for a project out in the open means that your (volunteer) job is literally talking to people. Firemen may be volunteers in many regions, but if a random fireman randomly stopped putting out fires because "I don't owe you anything!", they'd be rightfully kicked out. Just because you're not getting paid, it doesn't mean you have no moral duty to anything in life.
RMS would famously shout "YOU are the GNU Hurd maintainer!" at people who asked him what GNU's plan for Hurd was. That obviously turned out great. It's a good attitude to have if you don't want anything to happen and just want to claim the moral high ground, it's not great if you want your project to be successful and it pains me that we're teaching people that it's ok to be unprofessional at volunteer jobs because you're volunteering.