The Rust project has a burnout problem

>>Philpa+(OP)
This is a good description of what life is like working on almost any significant open source project. The only thing not included was the comments from overly entitled users that saps whatever morale and energy you have left. Probably best he did not include that though as that is what all discussion would be about.

I am not sure what to do about the burnout problem. The way he described it is very on point though. Since everyone working on the project is overloaded there is a great feeling of things only get done if you do them.

Most of my open source work was in the pre-GitHub days when we used mailing lists, not pull requests, to build community. I do think there was something better about that for the project itself as it encouraged a lot more discussion and community building. PR's and Issues become silos and are not great for general discussion. I think they also encourage drive-by contributions which honestly are intoxicating initially but once you see people are not coming back become defeating.

>>markph+H4
> This is a good description of what life is like working on almost any significant open source project.

Open contributions project.

An open source project does not necessarily have to accept random contributions, issues or hatemail from the general public. [1] They just need to make the source available with a permissive licence, period.

I believe that Linux with its idiosyncrasies in its communication model (mailing list vs the ease of Github, strong dictator running the show) works as a great filter from entitled users, and that's an underrated feature in open source. See also sqlite.

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1: Yet hell will freeze over before Github lets maintainers turn off the PR tab which would lessen this problem a bit.

>>sph+G8
> Open contributions project.

That's a useful distinction and a good term.

So in total projects can be classified as:

    - Source available or not
    - Open source or not (a subset of source available)
    - Open contributions or not (also a subset of source available)
    - BDFL or community driven

That's a lot of variation and may explain why so many conversations about open source sound like people are talking past each other-- they're talking about different kinds of projects!

PS: Regarding:

> 1: Yet hell will freeze over before Github lets maintainers turn off the PR tab which would lessen this problem a bit.

I wish there was a standardized way of declaring this, I always feel so awkward writing the "no PRs" disclaimer on my toy projects.

>>seagre+Qd
> That's a lot of variation and may explain why so many conversations about open source sound like people are talking past each other

Most of the discussion is people suffering through GitHub-style social networks. I don't see a lot of people talking through each other, as much as I see people assuming this is the way, and others pointing out it's just one option.

At some point we have to acknowledge that GitHub is a toxic social network. The toxicity is way more hidden than Facebook and others like it, but it's there too. Every universalist social network is toxic.

zlacker