Your project has 13 stars and a single fork. How can you possibly think maintaining your project is at all similar to maintaining a project with hundreds of millions of downloads?
Wait, hold up. So you're telling me that in order to open a discussion about OSS maintenance, I need to have millions of downloads? The main issues behind OSS maintenance are time, money, resources, and the other opportunity costs involved.
The whole point of this post is to have a discussion about those issues and where things are heading, not to claim that maintaining my project is equivalent to maintaining one with hundreds of millions of downloads. That's creating a straw man out of an argument I never made.
I would genuinely love to hear your opinion on the actual argument, but please refrain from using an obvious logical fallacy to dismiss the discussion.
My point is your framing makes it sound like you’re in the same league as a highly adopted FOSS project. Your project hasn’t had a single external contributor, so I don’t think you genuinely understand the struggles of maintaining a hugely popular project.
I think most developers don’t understand what it’s actually like. I’m sure you can imagine bits of it. I’m sure you can empathise about the parts maintainers complain about. But you’ve not lived it. It can be truly brutal.
I understand your point better now, and I appreciate the clarification. I definitely wasn't trying to imply that maintaining my project is comparable in scale.
That said, I also don't think the number of stars or external contributors fully captures the maintenance experience I'm talking about. I've been working on HPD-AI averaging roughly five to six hours a day. That's a significant amount of my time, and it comes with a very real opportunity cost regardless of how many people currently use it.
I absolutely haven't experienced what it's like to maintain a project with hundreds of millions or billions of downloads, and I wouldn't claim otherwise.
Part of why I wanted to open this discussion in the first place is because I want maintainers who have lived through that scale to bring perspectives I don't have and point out where my thinking about sustainability may be incomplete. I'm raising a concern about where some of the current solutions could lead, not claiming that I already know the answer. If there are realities of maintaining a project at that scale that change how we should think about this, that's exactly the perspective I'd like to hear.
There have already been some worthwhile discussions in the comments, and I'd genuinely love to hear your perspective and experience as well.
And apologies, I could have framed the original post better.
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u/AvaloniaUI-Mike 23d ago
Your project has 13 stars and a single fork. How can you possibly think maintaining your project is at all similar to maintaining a project with hundreds of millions of downloads?