While these posts are about specific contributions to Mycroft, at a broader level they evoke the theme of open source sustainability in general, and I’d like to take the opportunity to re-focus the discussions here toward that theme.
One of the open source practitioners who has done a lot of work in this area is Nadia Eghbal. She wrote the seminal paper “Roads and bridges: The unseen labor behind our digital infrastructure”
This goes into a lot of detail about the sustainability issues faced in open source - if thousands of people use a product, but very few contribute to its upkeep, is that fair? So I can empathise with @btotharye’s decision not to continue with the contributions that had previously made - totally understand. Support work is thankless, tedious, tiring, and often you have to put up with people who are rude and entitled. At the same time, @jarbasAI also makes some fair points about leaving contributions in the open for others to use, even though support may not be provided. And again to be fair to @btotharye, we all know that even if you say you don’t provide support, people will contact you, with an expectation of support, anyway. You both make fair, and valid, points.
One of the frameworks that Nadia has developed is something called the 'four freedoms of maintainers`;
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The freedom to decide who participates in your community - Developers have the right to decide who contributes, who commits, and who doesn’t.
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The freedom to say no to contributions or requests - Developers have the right to say no to enhancement requests, support requests, and so on. If people want something, they are welcome to fork and build it themselves.
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The freedom to define priorities and policies of a project - Developers get to prioritise which cards are WIP and at the top of the WIP list, period. This may or not be based on user feedback. Developers who work on a project make its policies.
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The freedom to step down or move on from a project, temporarily or permanently - there are different ways to do this of course, and different approaches to ensure good succession, but fundamentally, a developer has a right to step down from a project whenever he/she/they choose.
Nadia Eghbal keynoting linux.conf.au 2017 in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia via @kathyreid on Twitter
What you YOU think of the four freedoms?