All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world.
I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interesting experiments, but I absolutely do not want to be stuck with the nightmare of maintaining OSS software for years.
Even on these small projects, I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. It has eaten up a few weekends, and was a relatively minor annoyance, but it gave me the taste for what OSS work involved. Working professionally for an OSS company gave me even more insight.
Maintaining OSS is a royal pain in the butt and I am forever grateful for the people who choose to do this. Running a popular OSS library is not a prize. It's at least a part time job you aren't paid for. The benefits are slim; even the "fame" part (name your top 10 favorite OSS tools, now name the maintainers of those), and has really limited rewards outside of that. I've know plenty of brilliant creators of OSS libraries who struggle to find jobs in industry that are appropriate to their skill level.
In fact, it's really hard to both run a successful OSS project and have a full time job (especially a high paying one that wants a lot of your brain and time) if you can't some how manage to make that OSS project your full time job... and even then you will be under constant pressure to find a way to monetize your OSS project (which inevitably leads to either losing that job or making decisions not in the interest of your community of OSS users).
OSS maintainers are saints as far as I'm concerned. So much of the world's software depends on them (even moreso in the age of LLMs) and the vast majority are compensated way less than your average FAANG engineer.
> I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about.
Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".
There's already all kinds of badges on GH readmes, couldn't we have a few more signifying "actively maintained, PRs welcome" or "security & critical bug fixes only" or "looking for new maintainers", etc.?
> Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".
The other spectrum that I’d like to know up front is where the maintainers fall on the spectrum of “I would be honored if you forked my project” to “This project is my baby and I will mobilize my users against you if you fork it”.
The refrain with open source is always that if you don’t like something, you’re welcome to fork it. But my experience with forking projects has, in a couple cases, drawn anger and attacks from maintainers. In a corporate setting when we ran up against maintainers who were unable or uninterested in even merging PRs, we had to fork the project and continue work in the fork. For some maintainers, this turns into “<corporation> is trying to steal my work!” even when the name and README were maintained. Or the maintainer gets angry that the name is kept on the fork because it is no longer under their control, we changed the name, which prompted more anger because we were “stealing their project” and so on.
To be completely clear, this isn’t all maintainers. Some have been so happy that they marked their original as maintained and referred users to the new fork in the README. But I’ve had enough cases where forking triggered anger or even calls to mobilize their Discord against the fork across social media (HN, Reddit, Mastodon) that when I run up against a slowly-maintained OSS project I try to look for alternatives or evaluate the effort to just build it in house to avoid drama.
Open source culture has changed so much over the past couple of decades that it seems totally reasonable now for up-and-coming maintainers to question the whole thing.
Scale has changed everything. There are orders of magnitudes more users than contributors compared to some of the early OSS and the balance between grateful and entitled end-users has skewed expectations much more towards maintainers as a support role with similar responsibilities to a product engineer in the commercial world. Why would you want to enter into that social contract now? Why would you want to risk your library taking off and the associated costs that would bring (as well as benefits)?
An alternative evolutionary pathway for OSS is for developers and communities to self-host their own git projects. Projects get to define their own ethos and workflow. Discovery remains high-friction which prevents the commodification of maintainer effort. The bar for writing custom tools to support things like this got a whole lot lower so it might start to make sense more than it did in the past (there are both push and pull forces at work here). It might even make OSS fun again.
I agree with all of this, and as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, anything I release now is going to be a tar.gz/zip with a LICENSE file in it, and people can do what they want with it, but they're not getting tech support on it.
However, this is a really sad state of affairs, and I'm wondering if we can't have scale _with_ friction to counter some of these pain points?
What's surprising to me is that TFA is from GH who are uniquely placed to have a real impact in terms of OSS maintainer quality of life.
If they're so keen on helping people publish more stuff and showing how awesome AI is, perhaps they can pre-screen the entitled comments and just not let them get posted? Perhaps they could see that you've not touched a repo in 5 years and when that PR comes in, they could help bootstrap you back in with a code review summary? Perhaps they could stop the idiots pressuring you by explaining to them all the reasons why their PR might not get looked at any time soon?
Perhaps, just perhaps, Github could take some ownership of the problems they have created, and do some work to fix them?
Exactly - best case scenario is Reddit/HN front page with a cool project you enjoyed working on, have some nice conversations there, reach a few 100s stars which look good on your CV, and that’s it.
If you expect more long term support you better be paying me for my time.
I have started a new OSS project and intend to provide optional enterprise offerings on top. I really don't care if someone steals the ideas presented in code because they're actually fairly pedestrian. The much bigger concern for me is the fact that if I do not make my source open by default, I will have a very hard time developing trust in the community and prospective customers. I know I nearly instantly walk away from the "provide your info to download our white paper PDF" sales experiences in 2025.
It is also helpful to remember that 100% of $0 is still $0. And that .001% of a trillion dollar TAM is still a pretty big deal.
This is pretty much the only way open source doesnt lead to burnout and continues to be maintained, and a lot of projects are doing this already successfully.
Get “street cred” in the dev space by being open source, and let the enterprise customers “pay” for it.
I maintain Navigator, a development tool I started over twenty years ago; I am the only contributor to the open source repository [1]. I have rewritten drag and drop in that thing four times (because drag and drop in Livecode [2] is a bit of a hack). It's a pain every time. I'm not rewriting it again.
I have a side project that I have worked on for years, mainly because I enjoy writing software. I get an adrenaline rush when I can make my data management system do things better and/or faster than other things on the market.
I have written articles about it and made the binaries freely available on my website under an 'open beta'. People keep telling me that if I really want it to take off, I should open source it.
So far, I have resisted doing that, for many of the reasons that you cited.
Absolutely. I say that being an OSS maintainer is a job, which can easily become a full time job, where the pay is often non-existent. If you have a separate full time job, you now have to choose:
1. Work two jobs until you burn out.
2. Quit your paying job and hope you have you don't go broke.
3. Scale back or quit maintaining OSS projects.
I think companies, governments, and societies could do a better job funding this work. But since this is a "tragedy of the commons" problem, I'm not holding my breath that this will happen before the public experiences a lot more pain from failures.
I suppose we're going to just gloss over the fact that the primary party benefitting from people publishing their work like this is someone else.
Someone else being usually some corp that is happy to pay with exposure instead of money.
This is of course a rather cynical read, but the first instance of luck being "Having your OSS library take off" kinda paints this picture for me.
Which does make sense I guess, given that it's a piece of writing by the great free labor extraction machine GitHub, which was bought by Microsoft not because they had suddenly gotten altruistic at heart.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad, but there obviously is a clear conflict of interest here that doesn't get explored at all.
There is a point to be made for not publishing your work in ways that makes it trivial for others to benefit from it. A more balanced piece of writing would've warned about this instead of purely providing encouragement.
Was looking for a comment to articulate this better than I could. I have the same feeling about 'release something bad early' advice given by investors, it's so obviously a shady comment in that position because they have the resources to build a clone if they can't talk to you.
I keep waiting for this younger generation to wake up to why we invented the GPL in the first place. Entities that are happy to use your brains for a while, and then eagerly dispose of you when they can.
They love your free labour. "Thanks for your OSS project! No, no, we're not hiring... and you'd never make it through out interview process!"
One should make free software for other free software developers and grateful end users. Not for parasites. Recognition doesn't pay the mortgage. And now you won't even get that because your work will just end distilled into weights in a large language model.
I have no doubt your intentions were good and I am a fan of open-source myself.
Unfortunately, since this was written, it’s become more widely known and commonplace for large corporations to disproportionally benefit from open source.
And that wouldn’t bother so many as much if it weren’t for the fact that large corporations often do not give back. It’s become so much of an issue that OSS maintainers have switched licenses, some have shifted closed-source, and others have simply abandoned their projects.
Just last week I began rethinking usage of MIT/Apache licenses for future work.
For the longest time I was hesitant about GPLv3 and almost scared to use in my personal projects, but it turns out my hesitations were fueled by...large corporations.
Hi! How - if at all - would you amend your advice now that scraping and LLMs have become so big that any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit?
I have a lot that I'd love to share (and let's... charitably... assume it's worthwhile stuff) but would be afraid to start just because of this stumbling block.
If you throw my nickname into a search engine, you will see that that is the case for me as well. Doesn't change anything about what I said though.
If anything, the fact that it worked for me, yet I found it necessary to add the full context, probably strengthens the statement even more.
But anyway.
Standard damage control statement that latches onto nothing because there is nothing to latch on to as I made sure to structure the comment that way.
I hate corporate so much man.
Just because you can predict what happens doesn't mean that the happening would be any less frustrating.
___
I understand that your role requires you to do this.
That is clear to anyone moving through these systems.
What I do not understand though is why you even tried to deflect this with such a low-quality "oh it worked for me it might not have worked for you. YMMV" thing, when you could've also just said nothing at all, not forcing my hand and making me call you out on that.
That is, above all else, strategically unwise.
Fortunately, however, this all doesn't matter. It's not like anyone cares about anything on this platform anyway. So even a strategically unwise move might as well not exist at all.
I publish into an open sea and hear nothing in reply. The constant reassurance from every platform that i use that i am merely "one more post" away from all my wildest dreams has to be true eventually, right?
It is not straightforward, however. One guy did only product-led marketing and it took him 3 years for his SaaS to make good numbers. And he's probably an outlier, since he's featured on the show.
And then you have another guy, who blogged for 5 years about Ruby and only after those 5 years using the audience from that, he built an OSS project with monetisation on top of that. But he could do that because he talked to his audience about ideas.
Listening to those interviews, I get the impression that if you know what you're doing, you can make a profitable SaaS in 2 or 3 years. But to get to a state, where you know what you're doing, you need at least another 3 years or more of actually putting in the reps in an honest way.
And I think that's where the "increase your luck" comes in. I think it's kind of shallow non-sense in the vein of motivational speaking but lots of people like this kind of content and like to be aspirational. Lots of the books sold by internet hustlers, like Rob Walling or Aaron Francis, don't get read, only bought.
"Becoming known" (the definition of which I leave as an exercise for the reader) isn't an automatic meal ticket but it does, as I allude to in another comment, lead to connections that you can sometimes take advantage of in various ways.
Whether that's open source code, writing, various consulting, speaking at conferences, etc. will vary with the person. And the more you can do on a company's dime the better.
When we become ghost content producers for LLMs, you are not supposed to hear something in reply to your post, book, or other work. Most of the time, your work will be ingested by a handful of companies as training data; the readers benefitting from your work will pay these companies, and in return these companies will thoroughly shield and insulate you from being thanked by the people you helped. These companies will do their best to ensure you are motivated to continue producing honest content that can keep their LLMs from choking on their own output.
The exceptions to this are closed (or semi-closed) communities and forums where you directly interact with humans, either by inertia due to a large established human user base or (for newer, smaller communities) via personal vetting of participants.
Obviously the solution here is to have the LLMs post thank you notes, and offer a complex network of job offers for all of these people contributing to open source. Of course the jobs don’t actually exist, but these acts of kindness will keep the producers thinking that they are both in demand and appreciated.
You may want to be more goal oriented. If you're just publishing into a void and hoping for things to happen, I mean I'm not an influencer, but the successful ones I do know have specific goals that they're driving towards are not screaming into the void and hoping for the best.
Not looking for you to answer these questions for me here, but ask yourself, what are those dreams specifically? What are the concrete steps you've taken to get there, and how are you going to accomplish them? How long is it going to take you? What are success criteria? What are the risks? What are the failure modes?
Because of OSS, I’ve never actually applied for a job or done a Leetcode interview. I’ve gotten multiple direct offers through Twitter DMs (I don’t post) and multiple referrals through random encounters that I never used.
E.g. Debugging an interesting issue with GitHub customer support eventually led to a referral for Microsoft by an MD. Similar stories with Cloudflare and more.
It’s not limited to OSS, but just having any sort of backing credibility to your name without going through the whole CV/CL process unlocks a whole slew of opportunities since people can “pre-screen” you from the start.
You're sort of describing networks more broadly whether you initiate a connection or someone at a company does. Latterly, I didn't apply in the usual sense for 25 years or so.
Don't code a lot but have written books which led to book signings at conferences that probably led to other opportunities if I had the need to exploit them.
This resonates with how I’ve been thinking about open source. I see the steps as:
1. Personally identify a pain in your own work, and it most likely will be a pain for many others.
2. Build a solution to solve for it.
3. Organically talk about it in forums — for me this is Reddit, HN lately and to some extent Bluesky.
When people ask why I build open source, I say it’s about signaling. As other comments have mentioned, if you’re fortunate enough that it gains traction, it becomes your calling card and can lead to consulting and jobs. It’s analogous to academic publishing (used to do more of that) but with different dynamics.
My personal examples of solving for a pain are:
[A] I started building the Langroid LLM agent framework after having a look at LangChain in Apr 2023, at a time when there was hardly any talk of LLM-agents. The aim was to create a principled, hackable, lightweight library for building LLM applications, and agents happened to be a good abstraction:
https://github.com/langroid/langroid
[B] With the explosion of Claude Code and similar CLI coding agents, there were several interesting problems to solve for myself, and I started collecting them here: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools
One such tool is a lossless alternative to compaction, and a Tmux-CLI tool/skill for CLI agents to interact with others.
I wrote a few math books. Does it increase my luck? A little bit, here or there. Will I recoup the 1200+ hours working on the project and be paid at least minimum wage for that? No chance.
Readit News
All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world.
I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interesting experiments, but I absolutely do not want to be stuck with the nightmare of maintaining OSS software for years.
Even on these small projects, I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. It has eaten up a few weekends, and was a relatively minor annoyance, but it gave me the taste for what OSS work involved. Working professionally for an OSS company gave me even more insight.
Maintaining OSS is a royal pain in the butt and I am forever grateful for the people who choose to do this. Running a popular OSS library is not a prize. It's at least a part time job you aren't paid for. The benefits are slim; even the "fame" part (name your top 10 favorite OSS tools, now name the maintainers of those), and has really limited rewards outside of that. I've know plenty of brilliant creators of OSS libraries who struggle to find jobs in industry that are appropriate to their skill level.
In fact, it's really hard to both run a successful OSS project and have a full time job (especially a high paying one that wants a lot of your brain and time) if you can't some how manage to make that OSS project your full time job... and even then you will be under constant pressure to find a way to monetize your OSS project (which inevitably leads to either losing that job or making decisions not in the interest of your community of OSS users).
OSS maintainers are saints as far as I'm concerned. So much of the world's software depends on them (even moreso in the age of LLMs) and the vast majority are compensated way less than your average FAANG engineer.
Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".
There's already all kinds of badges on GH readmes, couldn't we have a few more signifying "actively maintained, PRs welcome" or "security & critical bug fixes only" or "looking for new maintainers", etc.?
The other spectrum that I’d like to know up front is where the maintainers fall on the spectrum of “I would be honored if you forked my project” to “This project is my baby and I will mobilize my users against you if you fork it”.
The refrain with open source is always that if you don’t like something, you’re welcome to fork it. But my experience with forking projects has, in a couple cases, drawn anger and attacks from maintainers. In a corporate setting when we ran up against maintainers who were unable or uninterested in even merging PRs, we had to fork the project and continue work in the fork. For some maintainers, this turns into “<corporation> is trying to steal my work!” even when the name and README were maintained. Or the maintainer gets angry that the name is kept on the fork because it is no longer under their control, we changed the name, which prompted more anger because we were “stealing their project” and so on.
To be completely clear, this isn’t all maintainers. Some have been so happy that they marked their original as maintained and referred users to the new fork in the README. But I’ve had enough cases where forking triggered anger or even calls to mobilize their Discord against the fork across social media (HN, Reddit, Mastodon) that when I run up against a slowly-maintained OSS project I try to look for alternatives or evaluate the effort to just build it in house to avoid drama.
Scale has changed everything. There are orders of magnitudes more users than contributors compared to some of the early OSS and the balance between grateful and entitled end-users has skewed expectations much more towards maintainers as a support role with similar responsibilities to a product engineer in the commercial world. Why would you want to enter into that social contract now? Why would you want to risk your library taking off and the associated costs that would bring (as well as benefits)?
An alternative evolutionary pathway for OSS is for developers and communities to self-host their own git projects. Projects get to define their own ethos and workflow. Discovery remains high-friction which prevents the commodification of maintainer effort. The bar for writing custom tools to support things like this got a whole lot lower so it might start to make sense more than it did in the past (there are both push and pull forces at work here). It might even make OSS fun again.
However, this is a really sad state of affairs, and I'm wondering if we can't have scale _with_ friction to counter some of these pain points?
If they're so keen on helping people publish more stuff and showing how awesome AI is, perhaps they can pre-screen the entitled comments and just not let them get posted? Perhaps they could see that you've not touched a repo in 5 years and when that PR comes in, they could help bootstrap you back in with a code review summary? Perhaps they could stop the idiots pressuring you by explaining to them all the reasons why their PR might not get looked at any time soon?
Perhaps, just perhaps, Github could take some ownership of the problems they have created, and do some work to fix them?
Lot's of entitled "I want to speak to the manager" types ruined it for me.
And for little benefits to myself. Hitting HN front page or r/programming was nice for my ego. But that’s about it.
If you expect more long term support you better be paying me for my time.
It is also helpful to remember that 100% of $0 is still $0. And that .001% of a trillion dollar TAM is still a pretty big deal.
Get “street cred” in the dev space by being open source, and let the enterprise customers “pay” for it.
1. https://github.com/gcanyon/navigator
2. https://livecode.com
I have written articles about it and made the binaries freely available on my website under an 'open beta'. People keep telling me that if I really want it to take off, I should open source it.
So far, I have resisted doing that, for many of the reasons that you cited.
It's an article about how some of the best people do work that engages with public view and discussion either very trivially or not at all (or both).
Hard to describe more clearly but it has been a huge influence on me.
1. Work two jobs until you burn out.
2. Quit your paying job and hope you have you don't go broke.
3. Scale back or quit maintaining OSS projects.
I think companies, governments, and societies could do a better job funding this work. But since this is a "tragedy of the commons" problem, I'm not holding my breath that this will happen before the public experiences a lot more pain from failures.
Someone else being usually some corp that is happy to pay with exposure instead of money.
This is of course a rather cynical read, but the first instance of luck being "Having your OSS library take off" kinda paints this picture for me.
Which does make sense I guess, given that it's a piece of writing by the great free labor extraction machine GitHub, which was bought by Microsoft not because they had suddenly gotten altruistic at heart.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad, but there obviously is a clear conflict of interest here that doesn't get explored at all.
There is a point to be made for not publishing your work in ways that makes it trivial for others to benefit from it. A more balanced piece of writing would've warned about this instead of purely providing encouragement.
They love your free labour. "Thanks for your OSS project! No, no, we're not hiring... and you'd never make it through out interview process!"
One should make free software for other free software developers and grateful end users. Not for parasites. Recognition doesn't pay the mortgage. And now you won't even get that because your work will just end distilled into weights in a large language model.
And that wouldn’t bother so many as much if it weren’t for the fact that large corporations often do not give back. It’s become so much of an issue that OSS maintainers have switched licenses, some have shifted closed-source, and others have simply abandoned their projects.
Just last week I began rethinking usage of MIT/Apache licenses for future work. For the longest time I was hesitant about GPLv3 and almost scared to use in my personal projects, but it turns out my hesitations were fueled by...large corporations.
I have a lot that I'd love to share (and let's... charitably... assume it's worthwhile stuff) but would be afraid to start just because of this stumbling block.
If anything, the fact that it worked for me, yet I found it necessary to add the full context, probably strengthens the statement even more.
But anyway. Standard damage control statement that latches onto nothing because there is nothing to latch on to as I made sure to structure the comment that way.
I hate corporate so much man. Just because you can predict what happens doesn't mean that the happening would be any less frustrating.
___
I understand that your role requires you to do this. That is clear to anyone moving through these systems.
What I do not understand though is why you even tried to deflect this with such a low-quality "oh it worked for me it might not have worked for you. YMMV" thing, when you could've also just said nothing at all, not forcing my hand and making me call you out on that.
That is, above all else, strategically unwise.
Fortunately, however, this all doesn't matter. It's not like anyone cares about anything on this platform anyway. So even a strategically unwise move might as well not exist at all.
It is not straightforward, however. One guy did only product-led marketing and it took him 3 years for his SaaS to make good numbers. And he's probably an outlier, since he's featured on the show.
And then you have another guy, who blogged for 5 years about Ruby and only after those 5 years using the audience from that, he built an OSS project with monetisation on top of that. But he could do that because he talked to his audience about ideas.
Listening to those interviews, I get the impression that if you know what you're doing, you can make a profitable SaaS in 2 or 3 years. But to get to a state, where you know what you're doing, you need at least another 3 years or more of actually putting in the reps in an honest way.
And I think that's where the "increase your luck" comes in. I think it's kind of shallow non-sense in the vein of motivational speaking but lots of people like this kind of content and like to be aspirational. Lots of the books sold by internet hustlers, like Rob Walling or Aaron Francis, don't get read, only bought.
Whether that's open source code, writing, various consulting, speaking at conferences, etc. will vary with the person. And the more you can do on a company's dime the better.
The exceptions to this are closed (or semi-closed) communities and forums where you directly interact with humans, either by inertia due to a large established human user base or (for newer, smaller communities) via personal vetting of participants.
Not looking for you to answer these questions for me here, but ask yourself, what are those dreams specifically? What are the concrete steps you've taken to get there, and how are you going to accomplish them? How long is it going to take you? What are success criteria? What are the risks? What are the failure modes?
Because of OSS, I’ve never actually applied for a job or done a Leetcode interview. I’ve gotten multiple direct offers through Twitter DMs (I don’t post) and multiple referrals through random encounters that I never used.
E.g. Debugging an interesting issue with GitHub customer support eventually led to a referral for Microsoft by an MD. Similar stories with Cloudflare and more.
It’s not limited to OSS, but just having any sort of backing credibility to your name without going through the whole CV/CL process unlocks a whole slew of opportunities since people can “pre-screen” you from the start.
Don't code a lot but have written books which led to book signings at conferences that probably led to other opportunities if I had the need to exploit them.
Deleted Comment
1. Personally identify a pain in your own work, and it most likely will be a pain for many others.
2. Build a solution to solve for it.
3. Organically talk about it in forums — for me this is Reddit, HN lately and to some extent Bluesky.
When people ask why I build open source, I say it’s about signaling. As other comments have mentioned, if you’re fortunate enough that it gains traction, it becomes your calling card and can lead to consulting and jobs. It’s analogous to academic publishing (used to do more of that) but with different dynamics.
My personal examples of solving for a pain are:
[A] I started building the Langroid LLM agent framework after having a look at LangChain in Apr 2023, at a time when there was hardly any talk of LLM-agents. The aim was to create a principled, hackable, lightweight library for building LLM applications, and agents happened to be a good abstraction: https://github.com/langroid/langroid
[B] With the explosion of Claude Code and similar CLI coding agents, there were several interesting problems to solve for myself, and I started collecting them here: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools One such tool is a lossless alternative to compaction, and a Tmux-CLI tool/skill for CLI agents to interact with others.
> greetings peasants! er, sorry, valued open source contributors!
> remember, without you feeding us training data, we won't be able to train our AI to replace you at your dayjob!
> now, get back to work
Putting more out there will increase the probability of a reward, but it doesn’t guarantee it.