On one hand, I’m very supportive of more people doing open-source development on things like this.
On the other, I think some people might think, “It’s open-source, and our community has tech people around. Therefore, people could probably do the maintenance work for free.”
From experience, it’s incredibly difficult to actually get useful open-source contributors, especially for long-term maintenance of apps that aren’t extraordinarily interesting and popular. So it can be a nice thing to encourage, but a tiny part of the big-picture strategic planning.
Great point — this matches my intuition, but I’ve never participated in any serious open source projects, so I wasn’t sure how feasible it would actually be to get useful contributions. I’ve volunteered to help with a few coding projects in the past, and most of the time I quickly lose motivation to work on them. So I expect most volunteers to also get bored/distracted and not do anything useful.
I was thinking of Disagreeing.
On one hand, I’m very supportive of more people doing open-source development on things like this.
On the other, I think some people might think, “It’s open-source, and our community has tech people around. Therefore, people could probably do the maintenance work for free.”
From experience, it’s incredibly difficult to actually get useful open-source contributors, especially for long-term maintenance of apps that aren’t extraordinarily interesting and popular. So it can be a nice thing to encourage, but a tiny part of the big-picture strategic planning.
Great point — this matches my intuition, but I’ve never participated in any serious open source projects, so I wasn’t sure how feasible it would actually be to get useful contributions. I’ve volunteered to help with a few coding projects in the past, and most of the time I quickly lose motivation to work on them. So I expect most volunteers to also get bored/distracted and not do anything useful.