I quit OSS

21 February 2013

Amazingly comments are enabled on this (for now)

Last month (24th Jan) I took to taking down my Codeplex and GitHub accounts. My Codeplex account didn’t actually contain anything recent, but deleting stuff off there is a nightmare - you have to contact Codeplex staff and hope that they’ll do something about it. I tried about a year ago to do that - at least to delete some migrated/abandoned repos, but after the initial ‘sure, we’ll delete it for you’, nothing happened.

I digress - I’ve “quit” OSS. By that I mean my involvement in all projects I’ve contributed to has ceased - any that I “owned” have been taken down (save one, more on that further down). Several of the apps I’ve released in places like the Windows Store will continue but as closed source. Free, but closed.

So why did I quit?

There are actually many reasons, but they all boil down to the one thing - OSS ‘work’ had become unfun. At my heart, I’m a dev and I enjoy programming, but OSS was sucking the life out of it. I’ve taken up new hobbies (woodworking currently) to escape from OSS. That doesn’t sound particularly healthy, does it?

Ultimately I looked at the situation what do I want out of OSS, and what am I getting out of it? The answer being:

OSS is great for your job prospects? I’m a hobbyist programmer. I’m unemployable. I have nothing to gain from sharing my code.

More details

If you’re running an OSS project that anybody else has looked at, you’ll know that it isn’t just code.

Then you can get to the almost code related things. There are then two major problems - issues and pull requests. Well, people are still the problem as at their core I have nothing against issue tracking or pull requests, but it is always people who get in the way and make things messy.

Note, this is a generalisation, not all people are bad. Just most of them.

Issues for my primary projects came in a few varieties

Pull requests are a monster like no other. Scott Hanselman has noted how ridiculous receiving pull requests that are a wall of line endings are, but I have had some truly awful pull requests sent my way.

My ‘favourite’ was from somebody complaining that I didn’t have a dotsettings file (settings file for Resharper) included in the repo, after I knocked back another one of his pull requests that changed every single file. He ‘helpfully’ submitted a pull request with a dotsettings file, but with no explanation of what settings it actually set. A short list (there were waaaaay more things included) included

Surprisingly, I rejected this PR and he wasn’t overly happy. PR after PR was submitted slowly removing settings until I told him to just stop. He demanded that I provide one that I was happy with.

While an extreme example, not too far from the norm.

Ilya Grigorik sums it up best in what I consider a critical article for anybody involved or wanting to get in to OSS should read - Don’t “Push” Your Pull Requests. The comments on code reviews in that article represent what would be a wonderful PR - something I may have received half a dozen (out of hundreds) times. OSS PRs - at least to my project - are consistently

I used to think Linus Torvalds was a little crazy for not accepting GitHub Pull Requests, but given my experience with OSS/GH pull requests, I’m having a hard time faulting his stance.

OSS community thinks you owe it something

The OSS community in general seems to believe that whatever you publish online is owed to them. While I had dozens of projects online, only a few were popular and even then only one stood out amongst them all - MahApps.Metro. When that was gone, eventually people noticed that I was ‘gone’.

GitHub staff were offering to “help” me restore my account. I capitulated and let them restore that so ownership could transfer to Shiftkey.

It isn’t what I wanted, I just wanted to get rid of everything and move on with my life, but it is how it is.

This isn’t the first time you’ve quit…

No, but this is the final stroke for OSS for me. This time won’t result in a name change or dropping my blog (the brief period it was down was while I was finding a non-GitHub webhost).

Last year I quit Code52. Again, it was people. I was loving the project and concept but the people got to me. Trolls and haters. The OSS community bickering insane shit like semi-colons gets to you when all I wanted out of Code52 was to teach people.

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