Why don’t we ever thank open source project maintainers?

First, I can do such a project

“Clam? This project is too easy for me.”

“I can do a better version in a week.”

Sure, many people can build widgets in Hackathon or other small competitions or in their spare time, but maintaining a project is much harder than building one. Open source project maintainers need to do more than just write code, but also:

• Write project documentation;

• Check Pull Request;

• Look at the Issue you mentioned;

• Add new features to the project;

• Answer questions about projects on platforms such as Stack Overflow;

• Discuss with users in QQ, wechat and other user groups and answer questions.

An open source project maintainer must do so much complex and tedious work for free all year round.

Second, when it’s easy to use open source projects, it’s easy to forget the hard work of the project maintainers

How to use an open source project:

1. When we encounter problems, we turn to Google or Baidu for relevant solutions

2. Do a search on blogs and other related websites

3. Hey! Find an open source project, click the link, and read the project’s README. Install and test. Ha ha ha! Problem solved

4. We moved on to our next problem

Open source projects are like water and air. Many people just enjoy the benefits and take them for granted! We do not thank the air or the water, because we do not know who made it.

But we know who created these awesome open source projects! But we know who is maintaining such a great open source project!

Third, users believe that open source project maintainers do not care about being thanked

Users of open source projects may think:

“They don’t need that, they need pull requests and being able to fix bugs.”

“I think they prefer to receive donations.”

But they do care, and sometimes open source project maintainers really need you to say thank you. Of course, it’s great if you can donate to the project, but most of the open source project maintainers I know aren’t out to make money. They may end up making money, but it’s more of a byproduct than the motivation to develop the project.

I’ve noticed that open source projects are often better than non-open source projects. Because the best developers develop products out of passion and altruism. If you can’t or don’t want to donate money, you can write them a thank-you note.

Four, we are really “busy”

“We are changing the world with our hands.”

“My project has to start within a week.”

“We have hundreds of emails that need to be answered every day.”

“We just don’t have the time.”

These open source projects have greater potential to change the world; Perhaps one of these projects has already changed the world.

Instagram uses Django and a lot of our servers are running Linux

Without these open source projects, we might not have the projects we have today.

Hope when we are convenient to use the open source project, thanks to the project maintainer, and as far as possible let the project maintainer know why we thank them for their pay, how their project helped us, our heartfelt thanks to is one of the advocates continue to pay a powerful incentive.

Most importantly, we welcome anyone who is interested in the maintenance project, because it really is a great job. Once you become a maintainer, you will also receive many people’s sincere thanks for your efforts. I suggest putting a thank you tag on GitHub to not only thank and inspire the maintainers, but also invite more people to join in.

One last thought

Open source project maintainers are a great way to make friends and a smart way for companies to hire people. They are passionate, willing to share and persistent. They are true MVPS and they deserve sincere thanks 🤙