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Comment by PhilipRoman | Hacker News Reader

>For everyone else, open source becomes a one-way relationship: all giving, little receiving

For me, open source is like making a painting and hanging it on a wall where others can see it. I will never lose a single second of sleep over whether someone else likes it or not.

I would never take money for an open source project unless I was prepared to work on it full time. It would give me a sense of responsibility which I don't want.

Normalize maintaining your own fork if upstream doesn't agree with you. It takes me 5 minutes per year to rebase some projects where I wanted them to work differently than the maintainers had envisioned.

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This is a somewhat idealistic/naive view. If your project is even mildly successful and you get motivated to keep contributing to it more and more and form a strong community soon the leechers arrive. They start demanding more and more for literally nothing in return under the pretence that it's in the best interest of the project to add the features they want and to accelerate development.

It soon becomes exhausting to deal with them on a regular basis while still feeling good about contributing. People are faster to demand rather than appreciate and you start wondering what the point of all this is.

So yes, if you end up painting something that's like a high school project, sure, it's easy to leave it on the wall and not care. But if your painting starts getting displayed in galleries and there's a little "demand" for it, everything becomes a headache.

> in return under the pretence that it's in the best interest of the project to add the features they want and to accelerate development.

Which is why you shouldn't work under false pretenses. You willing to turn that project into a day job? No? Then tell them no. You owe them nothing. You've already done more than your "fair share" giving to the community by publishing open source code, no matter how good (or not) it is, or how many "galleries" it hangs in (or not). They have a problem? Well, by definition it's their problem, not yours. Let them own it, fork it, and solve it, if it's such a big deal.

"No" is how you set expectations and maintain integrity. You only have so many resources in a day. Don't become a load bearing internet person for free.

I have to admit, it's one of my guilty pleasures to tell people "no" when they ask for unreasonable things from me. Haven't had the luck of managing a large open source project, but the prospect of saying "no" to an overwhelming stream of demands excites me.

The big difference is that there are former house guests that will go back into the house, the door is never locked, take the painting, sell it on renowed art gallery, without giving anything back to you.

And this started to be a quite common practice nowadays.

How does that affect me? (Ignoring the difference in copying software vs physical things)

If people are willing to pay him, that means he must be fulfilling some market demand that I'm not interested in dealing with, be it marketing, support or something else.

Some paint owners feel offended that folks get into their house, even though they left the door open, take the painting away, and didn't got any cut back from the gallery.

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