First, thanks for participating in the discussion and writing such a detailed in-depth comment.
No code is perfect and people can get really self aware about that. I know I have had imposter syndrome in the past where I thought my code was shit, but people always complemented me on the result. Opening up the code can lead to people seeing how shit it really is and call you out on it. The code is probably fine, but it’s a legit fear.
No codebase is perfect and if someone just comments stuff like ‘yOuR cOde iS gArbAge’ you can tell them to fuck off or to refactor the code and submit a merge request. Don’t be embarrassed of your code or and be honest about it if you know that a part of your code sucks but you don’t have time to rewrite it.
Somebody contacted me to take it over, but I feel like he wasn’t serious about it. He just wanted to keep it running and be the owner, but not do any of the things needed to get it back on track.
Well, if you can’t find a good maintainer to take over your project and you need to abandon it, you can open source it and mark it as archived on GitHub. Maybe someone wants to build something similar in the future and can use your project as a reference. Also, maybe it’s not gonna be useful to anyone, but you don’t lose anything by making the code public after you already abandoned the project.
As for still active projects:
With open source people expect you to provide a way to report issues and respond to those publicly, with many people adding their 2 cents and big discussions. If you don’t see it the same as they do, or your solution isn’t what they expected or you simply aren’t fast enough, it’s a problem.
You don’t have to accept feature requests from people. You can either say that you only accept bug reports, or people can submit feature requests but you won’t implement them, and they will only be implemented if someone submits a merge request with a patch. You can also entirely turn off issues on GitHub and just do whatever you want.
We’ve all seen flame wars and stubborn developers on open source projects, the drama factor is real.
This rather only happens with big projects like Linux desktop environments or stuff like that (e.g. there has been a massive flame war between GNOME and KDE users)
Forks. Simultaneous the strongest and weakest part of modern open source software. On the one hand it’s awesome we can make multiple versions if the needs diverge or the original devs abandon the project. But on the other hand, it leaves you with very little control over the project. One case I’ve seen one dev worked on a project almost every Sunday as a hobby, the project was popular and had a tight community which grew a bit big. The amount of open issues grew and bigger tasks just didn’t fit in the original dev’s schedule. One of the community members was a good dev who just got laid off and had some extra time. So he forked the project and spent some weeks working on it fulltime, fixing a lot and expanding the project. The original dev wasn’t happy, it was his hobby and the community fragmented over people using the new version and the original version. Everybody was upset and the original dev called it quits and said talk to the new dev. The new dev however got a new job and also abandoned the project, with nobody left to pick up the pieces. The community was already fractured and people stopped using it.
Sure, rare cases like these exist and it’s unfortunate, but I wouldn’t say that his happens very often. All in all, I still think that open source is the best way.