Ah, the magic "just". I don't think you've really grasped the kind of people who spend years maintaining open-source projects. This is like asking sysadmins to ignore alarms and downtime. The kinds of people who can be comfortable ignoring downtime rarely become sysadmins and don't last if they do.
Feel free to prove me wrong by pointing to the major open-source project you've led for years and how good you have been at ignoring problems with it.
No, the magic word is "healthy". I said "healthy, acceptable, middle ground". This means learning to say "no" or at least "later, when I have the time".
I have maintained open-source projects myself for about 15 years, and it is completely different from sysadmin alarms. I can do it on my time, and even if with vulnerabilities I do it on the time I have previously allotted for doing it, since my family and my job comes first. And no, I won't dox myself. There, I "just" said "no" to you. That's a healthy way of establishing boundaries.
By the way, feel free to prove that I'm wrong in saying that by pointing to any law that says I have to do otherwise.
And no, just because people have unhealthy behaviours doesn't make it a rule or a law.
Oh? Which projects? I'm skeptical that they are of the scale and importance we're talking about here. And as somebody who has done open-source stuff and also done sysadmin work, I say that there are commonalities, so you can't just handwave it away.
I agree that unhealthy behaviors don't make it a rule. But deep-set behaviors don't change overnight. And it's not clear to me that people who are perfectly healthy would ever put themselves in the situation of maintaining important infrastructure for free. As mentioned elsewhere, I've closed down an open-source project of mine because it grew too big and became more of a drain than a pleasure. But if everybody did that, we'd have a lot fewer open-source projects. So I think your breezy "just" only works for the kind of people who would never have ended up with this problem in the first place.
The answer is not to close open source projects, but establish healthy boundaries between your audience and yourself. And no, you don't have to be healthy to establish those boundaries, but you do need these boundaries if you want to be healthy.
Rather than giving up and closing a project, my answer to abuse and unreasonable demands is to be liberal with ignoring and blocking. It's not my fault that someone chose to berate me, but it's my choice to keep giving them a way to do it. But most of the time, a simple "I will do it when I have time" is more than enough. I believe in carefully curating the online places I manage in order to maintain a healthy atmosphere. I choose health and well-being above "popularity at all costs".
About the projects, I'm not gonna dox myself, and I don't think the cross-examination is warranted or even in the spirit of this site. I believe my post stands by itself. You can doubt all you want, but that only solidifies my belief I'm doing the right thing.
I'm not saying you aren't doing the right thing. Good for you. Stay healthy.
I am saying you are delusional to talk as if what's easy for you is what's easy for others. And that you're failing to consider that people who are in XKCD's "random person in Nebraska" bucket [1] are much less likely to have good habits and healthy boundaries in the first place, because people like that end up bailing much earlier.
Bullshit. I utterly and completely disagree that the boundaries I mention are hard to implement. I will also say that boundaries and limits are not only healthy, they are absolutely necessary for long-term, large-scale, open source projects, and this is why those projects survive. People on FOSS rarely get to be long-term maintainers without establishing clear boundaries, so most active long-term maintainers obviously do have the boundaries I mention. This is a lot of people. I'm clearly not taking hobby projects, I'm talking about packages with thousands to millions of weekly downloads, for example.
The myth of the hero maintainer must die.
Binging Netflix is completely acceptable if you're in your free time. EVEN if the package has a RCE vulnerability. And most maintainers of popular projects will agree with that.
Easy for you does not mean easy for others. If you think boundaries are easy for everybody, go read Reddit's AITA, where you will find a flood of people who struggle with it, generally because important figures in their lives train them not to have boundaries: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/
I'm glad it's easy for you. But therapists can spend years working with people on establishing and maintaining boundaries in important relationships. You can't just handwave the difficulty away. Especially when so many tech jobs discourage having a good sense of boundaries in the first place. E.g., all the startups where people are expected to be bought in to a vision of changing the world, working crazy hours. All the bosses that talk about their teams being like families. All the places that talk up commitment and loyalty and going the extra mile. Which again you can see a flood of if you care to look: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/
> And most maintainers of popular projects will agree with that.
You're reaching and you're constantly misrepresenting and replying to exaggerated interpretations of my views. Unpaid OSS maintainer work is nothing like startup work or a similar to the issues in antiwork. The boundaries are much easier and much more obviously necessary than in any other relationship because direct contact is not mandatory, and productive work is impossible without them. Also, even if impossible for one person, other co-maintainers can even help with those boundaries, and there are tools available for that. Of course there will be people unable to work healthily with OSS, but those people will burn out very quickly and they won't be able to be long-term maintainers, period. Also, keep in mind that a large part of OSS maintainers are paid by companies to work with OSS and they do it on company time.
I'd likewise ask for a citation of some maintainer agreeing that watching Netflix on their free time is akin to "giving the middle finger" to users. That was one of the most toxic phrases related to OSS maintainer work I've ever seen on this website, and those views should not be spread as if they were acceptable. I stand by my opinion that the "work harder" vs "watch Netflix" is a completely fabricated dichotomy, and there is a very viable middle ground available (and necessary) for everyone.
Feel free to prove me wrong by pointing to the major open-source project you've led for years and how good you have been at ignoring problems with it.