A Third Way For Open-Source Maintenance
summary
Argues a "third way" between paying every maintainer and leaving projects alone: treat maintainer work as encouraging contribution not doing everything, break tasks into docs/triage/new-contributor teams, and protect scarce attention with aggressive moderation and limited release managers. Uses GitHub and rubygems practices, Open Collective context, and concrete rewards like named releases and commit bit privileges. Claims success on Puma with 15 minutes per workday, hundreds of releases and hundreds of millions of downloads and rising contributions since 2019.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Start
- 0:06A THIRD WAY FOR OPEN SOURCE
- 16:05WRITING CODE: FIX BUGS, WRITE FEATURES, REFACTOR WRITE DOCS ISSUE TRIAGE CODE REVIEW REGULAR RELEASES GREEN BUTTON CONTROL VISION/DIRECTION ENLISTING HELP
- 17:35ISSUE TEAMS DOCS TEAMS NEW CONTRIBUTOR TEAMS RELEASE MANAGERS
- 20:35WHY DON'T PEOPLE CONTRIBUTE, OR WHY ARE THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS "BAD"?
- 24:06MONOPOLY ON THE MAIN BRANCH
- 24:36HOW IS THERE A MONOPOLY ON A COPYLEFT PIECE OF IP?
- 27:06NO WAY TO BRING LEGITIMACY TO A FORK
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