Four main reasons I stopped maintaining most of my open source projects after ten years of contributing regularly. Tagged with opensource, mentalhealth, burnout, hobbies.

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GitHub published a curious article on avoiding burnout for open source maintainers. The article briefly mentions sponsoring but for most maintainers it’s unrealistic to rely on sponsoring or donations. The most healthy solution for avoiding maintainer burnout is quitting open source entirely, at least it was a solution that worked for me.

Why I quit open source

I disagree with the author’s viewpoint on quitting open source.
Open source projects can be a great way to build a portfolio and gain valuable experience in software development, which can be beneficial when pursuing a career in computer engineering or starting a business.
and can lead to recognition and even potential job opportunities. Many companies value open source experience and actively seek individuals who have contributed to such projects.

While I don’t entirely agree with the author, he’s got a point. There are some great Open Source projects that are truly dev-friendly, helpful, and helping you to learn. And I think I was lucky to be a part of such.
But there are also a lot of toxic projects, developers, and communities. Some examples were mentioned in the article. We also saw what happened when Turbo dropped TypeScript support.
That said - I hope that the author will give Open Source another try and I hope that this time he’ll be more lucky. But I understand why he did what he did - we only have one life.

Very good article and I can totally understand. The author is clearly burned out and my only advice to him or anyone that goes though a similar thing is to have a good rest and spend some time off doing something more fun and rewarding. Although coding is our passion sometimes we need to stay off our screens and unwind. In the meantime, think calmly how not to get burned out again and get things more manageable if you decide to go back. For me, quitting is never an option unless it really crosses the lines. So hopefully the author will find some terms that he can keep his very interesting projects going whilst maintaining a healthy work/life balance.
Other than that, thanks for sharing this article and stay healthy!

When people are ready for communism, open source will work lol

I think the comments here completely missed the point. Sure, there are good projects out there, you can say that about anything though. The thing is, we’ve come to rely on open-source projects. All of us. This expectation of OSS working is inevitably going to arise from this situation. It has to work, and this is why many companies pay engineers to literally work on OSS projects, like Linux, web frameworks, etc.
Open-source has become another area that grinds people down from high expectations but this time, most don’t get paid for it even if their software is relied on by many. In its current state, open-source is NOT healthy.
Saying that you disagree with this article because you know of a good project or two is like saying someone with cancer is healthy because their lungs are at least functional. OSS needs to change, or we’re just going to keep grinding ourselves into the ground (and we do that just for corporations to benefit too, if AI is any example).
You’ve all missed the point