a little bit of 😍 goes a long way in the virtual world

April 6, 2017 11:26 AM

Brian Anderson (brson) of the Rust programming language talks about the minimally-nice open source software maintainer.
posted by a snickering nuthatch (6 comments total)

It's emotional labour for the open-source software maintainer. Good read, thanks!
posted by clawsoon at 11:33 AM on April 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

This is like an excellent way of explaining how to be a good collaborator to people who aren't good at talking to other humans in general.
posted by lumpenprole at 11:49 AM on April 6, 2017

And then if anybody says "But Linus...", you very nicely ban them from participating in your project forever.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:08 PM on April 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

See also Nolan Lawson's What it feels like to be an open-source maintainer:

[B]y now you’re feeling exhausted; each person has either had a complaint, a question, or a request for enhancement. In a sense, these GitHub notifications are a constant stream of negativity about your projects. Nobody opens an issue or a pull request when they’re satisfied with your work. They only do so when they’ve found something lacking. Even if you only spend a little bit of time reading through these notifications, it can be mentally and emotionally exhausting.

and the followup suggestions from Mikeal Rogers: time to leave and Jan Lehnardt: stop caring.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 12:09 PM on April 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

There is a very mild, tiny sense in which I am grateful for the emotional labor skills gap in free and open source software, because it's the reason my business (a consultancy providing short-term/targeted maintainership services) has a market. But I do look forward to the day I'm out of a job because we've made open source sustainable, financially and emotionally.
posted by brainwane at 12:17 PM on April 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

In summary, do these things if you want to appear to be nice, and also if you want to actually be an effective open source software maintainer member of society:

FTFY. These seven rules apply to more than just dealing with volunteer software collaborators.

I agree with "yes" but disagree with its application: Years ago I read Fuck, Yes whose central tenant on "yes" was "yes, and let me show you what will happen!!!" It was a very dark application of yes but strangely correct.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 12:23 PM on April 6, 2017 [1 favorite]