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Agreed. People who demand free labor from open-source maintainers get a lot of deserved flak lately, but it is not that project authors are always blameless. Everyone who publishes some code for others to use faces a dilemma: they want their project to be popular (because being associated with a popular project is prestigious), but popularity means that the project demands additional effort to polish it, deal with bug reports and pull requests etc. So there is a temptation to convey the appearance of maturity without putting in the required effort.

So yeah, it is totally OK for your open source library to be shitty, but please state this clearly in README to save everyone's time.




I agree. If you are actively marketing a project, you are declaring yourself open to criticism. You don't get to play the "what do you want for free?" card and say "my thing is totally awesome and you should use it!" at the same time.


Yes you do. I do that all the time. It just depends on who you're talking to. You can usually tell within a very short period of time who is going to get invested and add value, versus who is going to fall behind and demand a disproportionate amount of attention.




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