Recently, I've noticed a certain idea a lot I didn't see before: that if you make something a lot of people like, you have a responsibility to them. In the real world, this happens if someone has planted a tree in their garden and people like how it looks, then when they want to cut it down, "the community" would like an opinion.
Likewise, in the open-source world, after a certain number of things start depending on your work, people often say it "should be considered a public good" - which is particularly confusing because public good seems something entirely different from its other well-known definition.
I think this whole idea of "if you make something nice that other people like, you are obligated to serve people forever" is totally bogus. I (well Claude+Codex) write a lot of LLM code these days and many of the base libraries are open source. If I had to write ratatui it would take a long time. But if someone decided to bully the ratatui maintainer I wouldn't ever know. And there's no way to un-bully someone anyway.
It's hard to explain to people how insane things can get when you give away your work and time for free, in the hope that it will benefit people. Some things I've experienced:
- People yelling at me in DM's when I didn't edit a podcast for community meetups in time
- Alcoholics joining in on FOSS meetups because they wanted attention
- People in the community getting spammed with crypto scams impersonating me that I had to answer to
- My work being whitelabeled and sold to investors to raise money to the extent people accuse me of stealing from others
- Smear campaigns making their way to my employer when I decided not to work on a particular open source project anymore
- I gave away hardware to community members; the reward was tech support requests
- Suicidal community members using me as a therapist (they claim I "saved their life"), followed by taking private (non FOSS) source code and giving it to to my competitors to advance their own tech careers
This is just scratching the surface of the things I've had to deal with in my open source work. I've learned to draw much stricter boundaries.
If you are going to get into open source communities you should go in with a plan for how you're going to deal with these kinds of things when they happen to you.
I'm sorry to hear about your experiences. I find it hard enough to deal with pushy people who have mismatched expectations (and yes, I'm not proud of it but at times I have been an entitled user.) I don't think what you're describing is limited to open source software though. Any time you make yourself available to the general population you're going to attract the full spectrum of human behavior. I guess the trick is to not make your project a honeypot for the debilitating stuff.
> I've learned to draw much stricter boundaries.
Could you elaborate on what has worked for you?
I imagine people who work in customer service have strategies too.
As one of the cofounders of an open source tool (Sourcebot) we have seen the "AI slop PR" issue explained here first hand. The amount of of PRs we get now from people who clearly have never even deployed or used our tool is staggering. We're working on a solution for this that leverages our tool, and plan to make it available for free for OSS projects. If you have any ideas, please reach out to me: michael at sourcebot(dot)dev
Recently, I've noticed a certain idea a lot I didn't see before: that if you make something a lot of people like, you have a responsibility to them. In the real world, this happens if someone has planted a tree in their garden and people like how it looks, then when they want to cut it down, "the community" would like an opinion.
Likewise, in the open-source world, after a certain number of things start depending on your work, people often say it "should be considered a public good" - which is particularly confusing because public good seems something entirely different from its other well-known definition.
I think this whole idea of "if you make something nice that other people like, you are obligated to serve people forever" is totally bogus. I (well Claude+Codex) write a lot of LLM code these days and many of the base libraries are open source. If I had to write ratatui it would take a long time. But if someone decided to bully the ratatui maintainer I wouldn't ever know. And there's no way to un-bully someone anyway.
This triggers me hard.
> One source of toxic behavior is entitled users.
It's hard to explain to people how insane things can get when you give away your work and time for free, in the hope that it will benefit people. Some things I've experienced:
This is just scratching the surface of the things I've had to deal with in my open source work. I've learned to draw much stricter boundaries.If you are going to get into open source communities you should go in with a plan for how you're going to deal with these kinds of things when they happen to you.
I'm sorry to hear about your experiences. I find it hard enough to deal with pushy people who have mismatched expectations (and yes, I'm not proud of it but at times I have been an entitled user.) I don't think what you're describing is limited to open source software though. Any time you make yourself available to the general population you're going to attract the full spectrum of human behavior. I guess the trick is to not make your project a honeypot for the debilitating stuff.
> I've learned to draw much stricter boundaries.
Could you elaborate on what has worked for you?
I imagine people who work in customer service have strategies too.
Well this just made me feel a whole lot better (similar experience, though not as hardcore). Good lord.
As one of the cofounders of an open source tool (Sourcebot) we have seen the "AI slop PR" issue explained here first hand. The amount of of PRs we get now from people who clearly have never even deployed or used our tool is staggering. We're working on a solution for this that leverages our tool, and plan to make it available for free for OSS projects. If you have any ideas, please reach out to me: michael at sourcebot(dot)dev
XZ Utils was a big example of this, the poor maintainer had to put up with toxic users and it led to supply chain compromise after a while.