I always thought that I could arrange at least small amount of time for OSS projects. I’ve managed to do that for several years. Of course that has meant I’ve given up the time from other things. As I thought these couple of projects I’m working on are more important than some other things.
This thinking worked until about year ago. Then I simply decided to switch my priorities. I moved these OSS projects to bottom of my priority list. Giving almost no time for them. Which has shown pretty clearly in past months. I’ve put in total few hours in last 6 months for these projects. While earlier I could put same few hours in one day. And it unfortunately shows: both WinMerge and Frhed are practically stalled projects now.
Most important reason was I realized the work amount required by both projects is way past my current abilities. Both projects require some serious re-planning and rewriting. I could continue putting lots of my own time to both projects and have things improved in say next 12 months. I’ve written some forum posts along that thinking.
WinMerge development was fun for many years. I learned a lot about programming, releasing, documenting etc etc. It was also quite stressful. It is not easy to release tool which you know lots of users will rely their work. The amount of positive feedback that we got was definitely what kept me going and developing. And that positive feedback still comes in.
But the fact is I don’t simply want to do that anymore. I started developing WinMerge since I needed a good tool for myself. And my motivation has always been selfish – I needed good tool and I wanted to share my work for others. And exactly this motivation has disappeared – I don’t need WinMerge so much anymore and I’m quite happy using current versions already. So why bother putting lots of my time to something I don’t really need?
I feel I’ve done enough of this free work for free tools already. And its time to do something else. I’m not totally giving up developing OSS projects. I’m still randomly working on these projects (including cppcheck). But the time amount I spent on them is lot less than before.
