Open Source Maintenance Is Hard Work

This resource first appeared in issue #5 on 07 Feb 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Software Development, Strategy: Product/Service Management

The Happiness and Stresses of Open Source work - Drew Devault
My FOSS story - Andrew Gallant

Research computing teams have a lot in common with open source communities - even if you aren’t developers or developing open source software. One of the joys of open source communities is that you’re part of a small, visible team solving problems for your users - and that’s exactly the situation we’re in. But there’s downsides to that, too. Users can be incredibly demanding, and when you’re a small visible team they can be directly demanding to you, personally. Members of huge proprietary teams don’t have that feedback. for good or ill; being one of thousands of devs on MS Word or staff in AWS it can be hard to feel like you’re making a difference, but you’re not getting emails from your users yelling at you because they don’t like that latest change you made.

There’s a lot of talk in FOSS communities these days about dealing with this feedback, including dealing with burnout, and I think this is something that managers should be keeping an eye on.