Fatih Arslan

The problems with this 'funding experiment':

- If he does advertising, everyone will eventually start doing it. Then everyone will start using adblockers, defeating the purpose originally planned for. It's a classic case of the Tragedy of the Commons situation [0]. This experiment would have never worked in the long term and only benefits those who do it in the beginning momentarily.

- He created a github issue thread asking for feedback from everyone [1], but then closed the issue thread. Later one he went on saying that he doesn't care what people say unless they're contributors to the library [2]. He could have just limited the thread to contributors only but he prefers pushing the goal post.

- If you can no longer support OSS, then hand it over to an organization open to the community, or archive the project. As an example, Fatih archived projects he could no longer support and the community had no issues at all [3]. People who can contribute will fork the project and continue with it.

- The core-js maintainer started doing ads like that first, promoting his own job advertisement [4]. It got to the point where he started deleting comments and blocking people on github which he disagreed with. Keep in mind that this is a package with million of weekly installs and used by babel libraries so people's output logs looked like this [5]. I believe it was violating NPM's terms of service too.

- Authors can do whatever they want with their own packages including spamming…

Question for the OP (farslan). I do apologise in advance if this is something you wouldn't want to discuss, but do you think a notice such as this would have prevented you from burning out in regards to your open source projects?

You have contributed immensely to the go community and I expect the decision to take a step back from open source contributions was hard and that you probably have revisited it often. I wonder if you have thought of things that might improve the process for other maintainers. Would the ability for example to disable pull requests help? Maybe a way to ask/find people to help moderate the issues or PRs before they reach you?

Thank you both (Fatih and Ben) for all the hard work you've put into open source.

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ps. For people who might not know what I'm talking about, this might help. https://arslan.io/2018/10/09/taking-an-indefinite-sabbatical-from-my-projects/

Oh my—I actually just mentioned Kitty for diplomatic reasons as some folks feel it's a friendlier alternative to Alacritty. I've personally never used it myself. Alacritty has recommended using tmux from the beginning (originally it planned to never even implementing scrollback and recommended tmux instead, but they caved and now there is native scrollback).

I believe I used this article when I switched over from iTerm to Alacritty: https://arslan.io/2018/02/05/gpu-accelerated-terminal-alacritty/

Otherwise, here's my alacritty config: https://github.com/sodapopcan/dotfiles/blob/f9eba86bf292aa3ba05f4d799199df9f439ec902/alacritty.yml. Line 57 is where the keybindings start (They are annoying to read since they use escape sequences). I make my tmux prefix `ctrl-space` (because `ctrl-b` is useful), then in Alacritty pressing `cmd` sends `ctrl-space` to tmux.

I'll add another attribute: popularity. I maintained a fork of a script that was rather complex, but had close to no feature requests and a handful of minor bugs. On the other hand, there is a ton of great research on burnout due to its prevalence.

One of the maintainers of some great projects wrote about taking an "indefinite sabbatical" - https://arslan.io/2018/10/09/taking-an-indefinite-sabbatical-from-my-projects/. He gets at the commitment in more detail.

The most complete resource I've found, on the good and bad, is @nayafia's Awesome Maintainers: https://github.com/nayafia/awesome-maintainers

It was definitely the Fuji X Half review.

https://arslan.io/2025/06/14/fujifilm-x-half-is-it-the-perfect-family-camera/

And I must make a correction, he doesn't explicitly mention trusting his kids with a 5k Leica. He's using a 10k M11 as a family camera and he lets his wife use it.

Still, I'd imagine a family with this type of money would have no issue giving the kids 500$ MacBook.

I should of brought up the thread where someone felt they needed to buy each daughters a Tesla...

Yeah, I love this part too: https://arslan.io/2025/12/26/books-i-read-in-2025/

> If I’m reading a book, once the kids are asleep, I have 3–4 hours each evening, and I also have free time on the weekends. So it’s possible to read a lot of books as a father of two kids. I could probably read even more if I stopped spending time on other things, like writing for my blog, learning piano, or doing industrial design.

I thought: "Oh, I see, so you don't parent much."