An Open-Source Maintainer’s Guide to Saying No
One of the hardest parts of maintaining an open-source project is saying “no” to a good idea. A user proposes a new feature. It’s well-designed, useful, and has no obvious technical flaws. And yet, the answer is “no.” To the user, this can be baffling. To the maintainer, it’s a necessary act of stewardship. Having created and maintained two highly successful open-source projects, Prefect and FastMCP, helped establish a third in Apache Airflow, and cut my OSS teeth contributing to Theano, I’ve learned that this stewardship is the real work. The ultimate success of a project isn’t measured by the number of features it has, but by the coherence of its vision and whether it finds resonance with its users. As Prefect’s CTO Chris White likes to point out, “People choose…
