Open source work

Who?

Project: All (specific projects are unknown)

Date: 11/16/2015

Why?

As of today I am quitting all maintenance roles / responsibilities of any open source project I am involved in.

Ryan Bigg announced that he was disengaging in one of his blog posts. Citing a variety of reasons, he first talks about his life a little bit. He talks about the opportunity cost of working on these projects (for free), what he’s missing out on as a result, and how it’s a “great recipe” for burnout.

I do not have the time or energy to invest in open source any more. I am not being paid at all to do any open source work, and so the work that I do there is time that I could be spending doing “life stuff”, or writing. It is not fair to expect me to do even more work outside of my regular work, and then not get fairly compensated (time or money) for it. It’s also a great recipe for burnout and making me just generally grumpy.

Ryan then brings up it’s also causing him to feel guilty about not addressing issues related to open source immediately.

To have an open source email sit in the inbox for days or weeks at a time just leads me to feeling more guilty about not having found time + energy to get to it yet.

With all that being said, he then reiterates his decision to disengage.

It’s for this reason that I’ve decided to end all my engagements with open source effective today. I will not be responding to any comments, issues or pull requests that get filed on any repository that I am in charge of. The only thing I will be responding to (in this regard) is volunteers who want to take over the maintenance of the projects.