We all love FOSS. Lately, many of us have expressed their disarray at hearing stories of maintainers quitting due to a variety of factors. One of these is financial....
Maybe I’m missing the point, but if you want to have union of maintainers/contributors, please go ahead, just be careful with assuming it can actually address the problem. You will never have any substantial percentage of maintainers. That’s kind of the main point of FLOSS: people do what they want to do, where they want to do.
If you want to collect data about what is used – with the goal of “not forgetting the little project with the library”, that’s also great but that’s going to be a lot of work and might be impossible to reflect. I can’t think about solution that would not be platform-specific.
Don’t get me wrong, uniting FLOSS developers along common goals, technology domains or philosophy, building communities and providing support systems is an absolute wonderful thing to do, even if you end up having what might feel like just a few projects.
I would not say “not believe too much in your efforts”, I think the tendency to simply scale down enthusiasm can be toxic in its own way.
I like to remind myself of how Václav Havel said it:
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Yes, being enthusiastic about false goals can lead to devastating results. Being hopeful by realizing that your work does make sense even if you won’t necessarily see results of it, that’s much more sustainable source of motivation.
Also, remember that no matter how it turns out you will learn something on the path. If anything, this is one of the “certain” parts.
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We all love FOSS. Lately, many of us have expressed their disarray at hearing stories of maintainers quitting due to a variety of factors. One of these is financial....