Reflections on "The Noble Path" and Timeline

I have done many software projects in my spare time. Many of them I have done in public and shared with the world. Most of them have not seen frequent downloads or stars. Perhaps they have been useful to or inspired somebody. But I wouldn't know.

I have one project, Timeline, which is different. Perhaps because I set out to create it as an open source project rather than just share the code. I read about how to create open source projects and tried to mimic that so that it would be successful. This gave me joy. I did it because I found it interesting and challenging.

The project got somewhat successful. At least if you look at usage of the application. However, it didn't get crazy successful. And I'm happy it didn't. Why?

In the beginning, getting requests from users was exciting. Someone found my application useful. Of course I wanted to make it better for them. And I got to practice software development as well. However, after many years, the requests went from exciting to work that I wasn't interested in doing and didn't get payed to do. The project had gone from a fun, challenging side-project to something that I felt obliged to keep maintaining, but didn't really feel like.

Recently I read The Noble Path. It argues that open source could instead be like gift giving:

[...] we've lost the language to describe what it feels like to simply make a thing that helps someone, give it away, and move on with your life.

Not every project needs to be useful and maintained for the masses.

Timeline is certainly not for the masses. However, it still requires work to keep alive. Dependencies need to be updated. Releases need to be built. And so on. And I never managed to build a big contributing community around Timeline. So it's just me and my dad and a few people that package Timeline for various systems.

Nowadays I mostly try to keep the project alive for others to use. Occasionally, I do some programming to implement features if I find that work interesting. I don't really care if users want more. I know that some people find it useful. And that brings me joy.

Timeline is certainly less like a gift according to the Noble Path because we have worked on it and made it better for others and we keep maintaining it. However, it is also more like a gift than a more successful open source project in that we don't go crazy lengths to please our users. And it is still relatively small scale.

But the expectations are sometimes difficult to manage. And maybe that is what the Noble Path is trying to argue for as well:

[...] but the deeper issue is rebuilding the cultural permission to make things small and keep them small. To build a tool, share it, and explicitly say: this is a gift, not a product. I'll maintain it if I feel like it. I won't if I don't. You're welcome to fork it, improve it, ignore it, or throw it away.

If users see open source projects as gifts, perhaps they wouldn't send feature requests and support questions in the same way that they would to a company.

I wrote this in 2022 as a response to the future of Timeline:

There was a time when I enjoyed working on Timeline because it improved my life (I wanted a better Timeline application) and it was fun when others started using it. However, maintaining Timeline purely for others is not that interesting for me right now. I have other things that I would rather work on. I guess that is the tradeoff with open source. People work on stuff because it is interesting to them and they share their project with others. Many people get access to many projects, but there is no guarantee anyone will keep working on them.

[...]

I still use Timeline myself. It is a useful tool for me. But it does everything I need it to do. But since I am still interested in using the software, I will make sure it works for me, and I will share my work. So I will probably never "abandon" the project. But at the moment, I will prioritize other projects of interest.

This approach I think has saved me from the "burnout epidemic" that the Noble Path talks about:

The burnout epidemic in open source goes beyond money (though money is part of it). It happens when something that started as a gift, something built for fun or out of real care, gets conscripted into an economy of obligation and expectation. You wrote a library because you needed it and thought others might too. Now ten thousand developers depend on it, and they file bug reports with the tone of customers who've been wronged, and suddenly your gift has become a job you never applied for and can't quit without feeling like you've betrayed people.

And that's why I'm happy that Timeline didn't get crazy successful. Because then, my approach would have been more difficult.

I don't have an answer for how to make open source sustainable. I see value in the zone between gift giving and a project for the masses that will get sponsored by companies. If I make something that is useful for me, there is often extra work to make it useful for someone else. I need to publish it, document it, provide installation instructions and so on. Things that I don't need because it works for me. Things that turn the gift into a product. But as soon as we do that, the expectation that the Noble Path talks about happens. Is there a way to create small scale open source products? I don't know.