Thanks to all the maintainers

By chimo on (updated on )

In this post, I want to take some time to express my gratitude to everyone involved in F(L)OSS communities out there.

The title of this post specifically mentions maintainers because that’s the situation that prompted this post, but really this is about everyone out there spending time, money and effort into an ecosystem that makes F(L)OSS possible.

I’m leaving out the specifics (which package, which OS, and who made the changes) because I don’t know if they want to be put on-the-spot, even though this post is meant as praise and appreciation.

Earlier today, I submitted an issue about an upstream bug affecting the version of the software that was packaged in the Operating System’s repositories.

In other words: “application v0.1.0 had a bug. This bug got fixed in v0.1.1. The OS package was still at v0.1.0. I reported this situation in the OS’s bug tracker.”

Within four minutes of the issue being reported, someone:

  1. Saw it
  2. Changed build file to point to the fixed version
  3. Created a merge request

Within 10 minutes after that, a second person:

  1. Looked at the changes
  2. Approved the merge request

All-in-all, the new version of the package was in the repositories in less than half an hour.

Now this particular change isn’t necessarily complicated, but it still needed precious time from two individuals, who cared enough to decide my situation was worth looking at. It needed the hard work from the people involved in setting up and maintaining the necessary infrastructure to make it easy for me to login and submit a bug report. It needs a working build system to package the software, and it needs servers and mirrors to get that software to the end-users.

That’s not even mentioning the hard work from the developers of said software, who then provide it to anyone for free (as in freedom, and for zero cost).

All of this is “businessf(l)oss-as-usual”, I know. It happens every day, multiple times a day. And most of the time I don’t really (consciously) think about any of that. Things “just work” or are “just available”. But even in those times, I do have a general sense of “gratitude” floating around.

I remember decades ago when I was told about Linux (a whole OS for free? And you can get a copy of the code‽) and F(L)OSS in general. It blew my mind, and I thought it was the coolest thing.

Every time I learn about a new F(L)OSS project or I install something from a repository, it brings me back to that feeling a bit.

Anyway, I’ve been rambling for a bit now so I’ll wrap this up.

I just wanted to say: “thank you”.