This is an Anti-Pattern in OSS. Start a project to build something you want/need. Update it as you want/need more things, but don't build other people's businesses for them.
> build something you want/need ... don't build other people's businesses for them.
Yep. Scratch your itch. If someone else wants different features then let them add them or compensate you for your effort, unless of course working on those changes is interesting for you or would help scratch your itches. If you do it for the "interesting/fun" reason make damn sure the requester knows that if that interest/fun stops then free work on the feature will stop and it might get removed completely if not maintaining it becomes a security problem or other burden.
"But what about the community?!" you hear them cry. Fuck 'em. Or at least suggest they do something for the community they care so much about by putting in a bit of effort in to maintain it, maybe forking your project to do so while you deprecate the feature and work on things that are interesting or useful to you, or paying you to work on the bits they particularly want and you don't. Your mental health should be much higher up your priority list than doing work to help people who (call me cynical, but...) probably wouldn't do the same in reverse.
I'm exactly the same - I choose not to open source things because it's more hassle than it's worth.
Also as someone who works in a Microsoft language, I get really tired of silly immature Go/PHP/Python developers who seem to get off on hating on Microsoft and have this strange desire to preach that opinion everywhere.
I think it's worth noting that it doesn't seem like the author here sees it quite the same way as you do. Burnout is obviously bad, but it also seems to me that he genuinely enjoys writing open source software, so I guess that enjoyment (plus some "opportunities" he got) is the gain.
This is quite similar situation when many idealist engineers grow, often unwillingly, into politics, management or C*O level - someday the coding fun ends and the not so fun business work takes over.
The hope to find similar people who really want to work on the project too and split the workload for everybody.
Giving something back: i use so many OS tools, so i give back a tool that a made to solve a problem for me, hopefully it could solve problems for others.
On the other side, you don't have to maintain an OS project, you can publish it "as is".
I know people that publish basic OS software and sell their time to extend the project to the needs of customers. (so it could be a business model)
Burnout is not a OS specific problem, it is something that anybody has to learn and find his own limits. I hope the post author learned how to deal with it in the last year.
If your primary motivation is short-term monetary gain then you're right, it doesn't sound like a rational undertaking.
I can think of two reasons to work on open source. Altruism, you want to give back to the community without expecting a monetary gain in return. Investment in skills, if you want to differentiate yourself from peers, you'll have something to talk about to potential employers. It is a great opportunity to learn and become a better software engineer.
> I'd only do it if it paid money. If people aren't willing to pay then I'm not willing to work.
Would a form of UBI, together with 20 or 30 hours work week work for you? I seriously wonder what the state of open-source hardware and software would be if society would focus on redistributing automation gains more.
Yep, I've stopped owning Open Source projects. All projects are for me now, and I reap the minuscule rewards from being all the only benefactor of the effort. But at least it's not a net negative burden of time sink, support, server costs, hosting, burnout, etc.
* open source project
* success
* no monetary reward, maybe just cost
* burnout
* project abandoned
This is why I don't try to make any open source projects - what's the gain?
I'd only do it if it paid money. If people aren't willing to pay then I'm not willing to work.