Open Source Maintainer Drama

Discussions center on conflicts in open source projects, including maintainers' hostile responses to feedback, public bashing on Hacker News, contributor bans, and debates over toxicity and brigading.

➡️ Stable 0.7x Open Source
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20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#4356
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Keywords

e.g ISTM OP HN WebReflection IMO OSS BSD twitter.com github.com maintainer community maintainers project zig zen open source source attack open

Sample Comments

fixprix May 31, 2025 View on HN

Did you miss the comment where they said, "We’re still planning to address this within the next few months."?Just because your niche issue isn't resolved, it is kind of a jerk move to blast them on HN especially when they've recently replied saying the issue is on their radar.In less popular open source projects this is what drives devs to abandon them.

ramblerman May 8, 2021 View on HN

A quick look found you a 3 year old closed issue?It's equally "toxic" imo to torpedo a project, and all the efforts because of some bad communication.Sure, the dev did fly off the handle initially but if you read the whole tread, he comes around, and actually keeps responding - in other words he cares.We already seldomnly argue the point anymore. Now it seems we don't even evaluate software at core value anymore, rather we must know the personality of its creators.

smukherjee19 Jan 22, 2022 View on HN

DISCLAIMER: I am not the developer, nor am in any way involved with ImageGlass.Wow, this thread is like 35 minutes old and people are already jumping to conclusions, bashing the developer, bringing out the torches to burn them at stake.Really disappointed seeing this on HN...Perhaps the title itself is insinuating, and people are not patient enough to dig any deeper. Perhaps someone can add [quickly reverted] or something to the title?That being said, I really wonder why people 100%

fsociety Nov 15, 2020 View on HN

“Engineer who works at Facebook has taken the name of my open source project”, corrected that for you.This feels like using HN to brigade an individual at best, and people might accept it because they opened the issue against Facebook and not the individual.

mont_tag Feb 23, 2025 View on HN

ISTM the post has a somewhat nasty and judgmental tone. Instead of saying, "ha ha, gotcha!", an issue could have been filed on GitHub and it would have been quickly fixed. Instead, the OP seems to be publicity seeking. IMO, this isn't worthy of being on Hacker News.

londons_explore Mar 16, 2020 View on HN

It's a bold move to attack the main contributor of the opensource project upon which your business is based...

aeyes May 22, 2020 View on HN

It's not good if the author of the project himself is raising this issue.

eternalban Mar 25, 2015 View on HN

Why antagonize the community by pulling repos if they only wanted the brains?

labanro May 12, 2012 View on HN

As long as Linus patiently explained why he doesn't accept guthub pull requests, it seemed ok. But calling someone a moron for it, that kinda hurts the community!

ninjagoo Aug 2, 2023 View on HN

This case might not be one of an intransigent maintainers. Check out Stavros' note [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971650