So I've been thinking about a new project recently. It's called thanksmaintainer.com, and it helps you say, "thanks, maintainer!"
Basically this idea came about from this GitHub thread where some user comes and disparages the Gulp project for being "not actively developed" and complains that it's taking a long time to release despite the fact that a) Gulp 4 is being actively developed and b) the Gulp maintainers owe this ungrateful, presumptive person nothing. As @contra says:
@rbatllet 4.0 is being worked - if you took more than five seconds to look you'd see it in other repos (for example: #1604). This repo has almost no code in it, it's a wrapper around the other modules so the contribution graph should be completely flat except for doc updates and major releases. We've responded to these tickets so many times - we have lives too.
I've had to move across the country 3 times since the tweet you linked - had my business unexpectedly fail (startups!), had relationships fail, deaths, travel, poverty, etc. - where the fuck am I supposed to find time to work on this while I'm trying to pay rent and put food in my stomach? The attitude people have towards open source authors is disgusting - I don't owe you anything, nobody does. Unless you've done something for the open source community (hint: you haven't!) then you aren't entitled to shit. If you want something to happen then help make it happen, otherwise log off.
I read this comment and thought, that freaking sucks. I feel like there's a problem in the open source and freedom-respecting software community where consumers demand stuff from project maintainers like the maintainers owe them something or they deserve some feature/bugfix/etc. This is obviously complete and utter bullshit - most maintainers work on their projects in their spare time - and it can start to feel like maintaining a project is a waste of time because all you get from it is a drove of angry entitled haters.
thanksmaintainer.com is designed to solve this problem. Here's how you use it; it's very simple:
- You visit thanksmaintainer.com
- You sign in with GitHub
- You find projects that you use and are grateful for
- You click the "thanks, maintainer!" button
thanksmaintainer.com will keep track of all the good vibes people are sending towards projects. When it reaches a certain threshold, the website will (probably) find a way to contact the maintainers and let them know how many people's lives they've made better. Not sure how this last bit will work yet, or if it'll even work like that at all. But the core idea is there - hopefully it'll be an easy way to give some love back to maintainers who may really need it.
Some design notes: it'll only work with GitHub to begin with, but eventually I hope to expand support to e.g. GitLab. Also, the fact that it's focused on projects and not maintainers is intentional - being thankful for a person instead of a project isn't as meaningful because you're not specifying why you're thankful. In contrast, the project-centric design lets you say, "these particular lines of code impacted my life in a meaningful way." Plus, a lot of projects have more than one maintainer, and it seems foolish to only thank some of the project maintainers, and not others.
I would love to hear feedback on this idea. So, if you have any thoughts, get in touch with me and let me know.
Stay happy <3