Craft software that makes people feel something

There’s something refreshing about explicitly saying “this editor exists to delight me, and that’s enough”. The default script now is that every side project should either be open-sourced or turned into a SaaS, even if that pressure is exactly what kills the weirdness that made it interesting in the first place.

Some of the best tools I’ve used felt like they started as someone’s private playground that only later got hardened into “serious” software. Letting yourself park Boo, go build a language, and come back when it’s fun again is probably how we get more Rio/Boo-style experiments instead of yet another VS Code skin with a growth deck attached.

I'm very much for people open-sourcing their projects in terms of releasing the source code. Just don't accept patches or whatever, keep the repos closed

Unfortunately, and I think to great overall harm, GitHub does not let you disable many of the collaboration features. I was just having a discussion today with someone who would be fine open sourcing their code, but is uninterested in any contributions, questions, or community interaction. Since GitHub won’t allow that, their options are to host it somewhere themselves where nobody will see it, or just don’t publish it, which is ultimately what happened.

> GitHub does not let you disable many of the collaboration

I wish they'd allow making issues and pull requests sponsor only. Could enable a business model.

It's weird that this thread argues to keep the fun in hobby projects and you ask for the exact opposite.

It's precisely because of the hobby nature of my projects that I want this feature. Support and collaboration are a lot of work. I have trouble conjuring up enough motivation to work on my projects as it is.

Sponsors can have quite a bit more entitlement then the average github dude. But well, maybe if you lock it down for sponsors the stress level is overall lower.

> Sponsors can have quite a bit more entitlement then the average github dude.

Is this some sort of unwritten agreement? When I was setting up my sponsor page, I explored the sponsor pages of other users for ideas. I don't think there were many sponsorship tiers with special features. Some people offered advertising space on the README, others offered access to an exclusive Discord channel, most just thanked the sponsor.

I'm still new at this so I wouldn't know. I only ever had one sponsor. Happened organically after my work was independently posted here on HN once.