1.
@nayafia
Consider the Maintainer
@nayafia for linux.conf.au

2.
@nayafia

3.
@nayafia

4.
@nayafia

5.
@nayafia
“Is it alright to boil a sentient creature
alive just for our gustatory pleasure?”
- DFW

6.
@nayafia
“Is it alright to boil a sentient creature
alive just for our gustatory pleasure?”
- DFW
(“Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental?”)

7.
@nayafia
Is it alright if a project struggles or dies
because the maintainer can’t keep up
with it anymore?

8.
@nayafia
Is it alright to compromise, or even deliberately
ignore, the happiness of maintainers so we that
can enjoy free and open source software?

9.
@nayafia
“The whole animal-cruelty-and-eating
issue is not just complex, it’s also
uncomfortable.”
- DFW

10.
@nayafia
“My own way of dealing with this
conflict has been to avoid thinking
about the whole unpleasant thing.”
- DFW

11.
@nayafia
What, exactly, is the problem?

12.
@nayafia
people consuming open
source

13.
@nayafia
Netscape browser (1998) lodash (2017)
Downloads in two weeks, 20 years apart
18M180K
100x!!!

14.
@nayafia
SourceForge (2001) GitHub (2016)
Total number of registered users
14M208K
70x!!!

15.
@nayafia
Two-thirds of top GitHub projects
are maintained by one or two
people

16.
@nayafia
2000 2017
Users
Maintainers

17.
@nayafia
2000 2017
Users
Maintainers
(NOT A REAL GRAPH)

18.
@nayafia
Why so few maintainers?

19.
@nayafia
Why so few maintainers?
1. Style of production has changed
(more smallish projects)

20.
@nayafia
Why so few maintainers?
1. Style of production has changed
(more smallish projects)
2. Being a maintainer isn’t glamorous

21.
@nayafia
“Hardly anybody starts as a
maintainer, it just creeps up on
you.”
Kjella, Wine AppDB

22.
@nayafia
1% of people create the content that
99% consume

23.
@nayafia
1% of people create the content that
99% consume
100% of maintainers are expected to
respond to every issue

24.
@nayafia
“Rapid evolution poses the risk of overwhelming
the system...thus introducing errors more
quickly than the system can fix them.”
Steven Weber,
The Success of Open Source

25.
@nayafia

26.
@nayafia

27.
@nayafia
“Every developer (unless they’re lucky) has
looked at page after page of open issues
and wondered why they’re the only person
working on any solutions to them.”
Jonathan Zdziarski,
“On the State of Open Source”

28.
@nayafia

29.
@nayafia

30.
@nayafia
“It felt like every day I had a notification
waiting to be opened about how badly we
had fucked up.”
James Kyle,
“Dear JavaScript”

31.
@nayafia

32.
@nayafia
Why aren’t we talking about this?

33.
@nayafia
A trip back in history:

34.
@nayafia
“Our goal should be to spread freedom and
then defend it. That is more important than
making our software popular, which would
just be catering to our egos.”
Richard Stallman,
“The GNU GPL is Here to Stay”

35.
@nayafia
Some people create software
sometimes.
¯_(ツ)_/¯

36.
@nayafia
Debian Social Contract
● Debian will remain 100% free
● We will give back to the free software community
● We will not hide problems
● Our priorities are our users and free software (“We will be guided
by the needs of our users and the free software community. We
will place their interests first in our priorities.”)
● Works that do not meet our free software standards

37.
@nayafia
“The implication of [the ‘Open Source’] label is
that we intend to convince the corporate
world to adopt our way for economic,
self-interested, non-ideological reasons.”
Eric Raymond,
“Open Source Summit”

38.
@nayafia
“The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a
non-profit...formed to educate about and advocate
for the benefits of open source and to build bridges
among different constituencies in the open source
community.”

39.
@nayafia
Both free software and open source
are oriented around the user, not the
producer.

40.
@nayafia
The four freedoms of free software
● The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose
● The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so
it does your computing as you wish
● The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your
neighbor
● The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to
others

41.
@nayafia
The four freedoms of open source producers
● The freedom to decide who participates in your community
● The freedom to say no to contributions or requests
● The freedom to define the priorities and policies of the project
● The freedom to step down or move on from a project,
temporarily or permanently

42.
@nayafia
Other things maintainers need help with:
1. Community best practices
2. Project analytics
3. Tools and bots
4. Conveying support status
5. Finding funding
6. Existential qs

43.
@nayafia
History revisited:

44.
@nayafia
“What is clearly missing from [Eric Raymond’s]
statement, and is ultimately as important, is
how those eyeballs are organized.”
Steven Weber,
The Success of Open Source

45.
@nayafia
Open source != Linux
(or any other big project you can think of)

46.
@nayafia
This stuff is confusing!

47.
@nayafia
But it’s worth doing.

48.
@nayafia
END