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When a small open-source tool suddenly blows up, the experience is nothing like people imagine(kaic.me)
I recently went through something unexpected: a tiny open-source tool I built for myself suddenly re...
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That's where I've landed at this point. If the GPLv3 isn't compatible with your project, fuck you pay me. This is something I'm doing for fun or because I need it, and you're only getting it for free if giving it away also has no cost to me.
AGPL will take care of a lot of these issues :-)
How so?
Many companies automatically ban using AGPL projects, and those that don't are much smarter and more understanding of how to work properly with open source projects.
Why did no one just provide a PR? I contributed to many project I'm not part off. Think this is a rhetorical question :S
Even coding savvy people go to the complaint box too. People just feeling entitled.
The ratio of the number of people who demand a feature to the number of people who send in a pull request or a diff-patch that enables the feature (tested working, not some LLM slop) is like a thousand to one.
What makes you think they would have accepted a PR for something they consider to be out of scope and not willing to maintain?
English is my 3rd language and I can not fanthom where you can deduce anywhere what I was thinking about maintainers from my comment.
From the comment you were repaying to.
There was no where in that comment that they won't accept PRs. Just people demanding you provide free support or making demands to you.
I didn't consider providing a pro-active PR as that.
A maintainer is not obligated to merge every PR. It says that they were demanding something that is out of scope. So if they created a PR for that, it would be a PR for something that is out of scope. As simple as that.
I had a very similar problem when my little project that I wrote just for myself, but just decided to share in case someone found it useful, exploded and gained over 1k stars on GitHub. People were demanding me to add a ton of different features, many of which are way too specific to be useful for someone else, and others are way too opinionated, e.g. "make it behave like gmail", for example. Many also requested features that were clearly out of scope for the project. I have merged a couple of PRs that I thought were generally useful - could be useful for a broad range of users, but I was still apprehensive about merging them as I personally would not use these features the PRs added, and having to test and maintain them every release would create too much work for me. (Every added feature interacts with one another so the test matrix is exploding in size with every new feature added.) This project was supposed to be just for my personal use, and it was designed to do just one thing and do it well - the project was already complete when I have shared it with the world and I had no intention of adding anything else to it. In the end, I had to start denying all PRs and feature requests as out of scope. The users can always just fork the project and have their changes applied in their own fork. I'm not getting paid to review and maintain a ton of mish-mash features. A maintainer is not obligated to merge PRs.
I’m honestly not sure why this discussion drifted into a topic I wasn’t even referring to, but here we are.
You’re explaining things I already understand, so I’m not sure why it keeps getting expanded. I do get that being pushed into a position you didn’t ask for isn’t fun, and I can empathize with that.
That said, this is largely a you problem — and I mean that in a practical, not dismissive, way. If it was meant to be a project just for you, you could keep it in a private repo. If it’s public, you can simply ignore requests you’re not interested in responding to. That’s a valid option.
If you want to accept certain things but not others, just be explicit about it. A
CONTRIBUTING.mdthat clearly states what you will and won’t address usually solves this. One of my favorite examples is this project:https://github.com/sst/opencode/blob/dev/CONTRIBUTING.md
There are plenty of other good examples out there too.
So yes, I actually agree with you: just ignore it. I’m not sure why you keep circling back to something I wasn’t addressing in the first place. I get that you were personally frustrated, but there’s really nothing here worth getting worked up over.
While I don't want to emulate the harassers in telling you what you should do, you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater through that approach.
Setting the project to archived has the same benefits in terms of ulcer prevention, while still allowing non-obnoxious users to benefit from your work, and potentially compensate you for it (though disappointingly few ever do). It also has the added benefit of depriving the trolls of a place to spew their nonsense, which will contribute to their frustration.
As I see it, in their twisted thinking, they get mad that your project wastes their time by existing, while failing to hold their hand and make all their wishes come true. One way I thought of to deal with that more proactively was to set up an nlp tool to detect such spam and countertroll its authors using your handle.
I breifly looked through the web for such a tool, but couldn't find anything satisfactory, nor do I have enough familiarity with the field to roll it out myself.
Just ban them. Drama queens deserve no quarter.
Sure, banning them is completely justified, and entirely appropriate. But on the internet, identities are usually free, and banning won't stop the nastier specimens from coming back for more with another account.
The main thing I like about the nlp idea is that it can keep the trolls distracted while their vitriol is ejected right into the ether, and keep the devs focused on actual problems.
I think GitHub actually doesn't let you create more than a couple accounts per an ip address (perhaps wifh a cooldown?), or at least that was the case before.
Reputation systems can help here, though they are not without their own pitfalls.