Top all-time · #2314
Mike McQuaid
Personal blog · mikemcquaid.com · on HN as mikemcquaidprogrammingcareer
Mike McQuaid's personal blog at mikemcquaid.com covers programming and career. Since 2016, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 52 times, most often “Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link McQuaid's 'Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing' essay in debates about what maintainers owe users. A 2016 post on the Strap macOS setup script is also linked.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- Called 'legendary' and said to 'perfectly sum up' open-source debates; another says it 'really changed my view'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
CTPO and Homebrew Project Leader
Most-linked posts?
- Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-03-20
- Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-11-15
- Sandboxes and Worktrees: My Secure Agentic AI Setup in 20264 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-04-17
- Replacing Boxen3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-11-07
- The Mentorship Diamond2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-09-10
- Entitlement in Open Source2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-09-21
- Open Source Contributor Funnel (Why People Don’t Contribute to Your Project)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-08-16
- Ruby on (Guard)Rails2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-10-24
- Open Source Must Be Fun (Or It Will Die)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-07-27
What Hacker News says?
I am 100% in agreement with your sentiment. This blog post is legendary (in my mind): "Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing" -> https://mikemcquaid.com/open-source-maintainers-owe-you-noth... It perfectly sums up how this conversation is going.
Comment linking /open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing/
on “Redis is open source again”Submitted Stop requiring specific technology experience for senior-plus engineers as a story · 362 points
HN discussionhttps://mikemcquaid.com Various articles I’ve written and talks I’ve done over the years working as a software engineer or at university. The skyline in the header is always a view from my current house. This site has lasted in some form across my name change, self-hosting in my university flag to Wordpress to GitHub Pages.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted Entitlement in Open Source as a story · 189 points
HN discussionThe officially supported thing is: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle See my Brewfile in my dotfiles for how I use it to install my stuff: https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/dotfiles/blob/master/Brewfile If you want to go a step further there's also Strap which will bootstrap your macOS system with some sensible defaults and install Homebrew, your dotfiles and your Brewfile: https://github.com/mikemcquaid/strap…
Comment linking /2016/06/15/replacing-boxen/
on “Homebrew 1.1.0”Submitted Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing as a story · 65 points
HN discussionI agree with your points when it comes to commercial software. You should do your best for your users. However, I have spent the last ten years or so writing some reasonably popular open source tools. I have met some lovely, lovely people who use my software. It makes my heart sing with joy to know I have helped out random people all over the world. I have also got vitriolic, self-entitled emails from people who ass…
Comment linking /2018/03/19/open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing/
on “A man who spent $100K to remove a lie from Google”Submitted Open-source economics is not what you think as a story · 50 points
HN discussionI strongly agree with using Homebrew Bundle in this way. Apologies for the self-promotion but I wrote a post about how I used this combination at GitHub to replace our use of Boxen. Works great for having Homebrew dependencies be project-specific (if still installed globally): http://mikemcquaid.com/2016/06/15/replacing-boxen/
Comment linking /2016/06/15/replacing-boxen/
on “Homebrew 1.2.0”Submitted Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing (2018) as a story · 34 points
HN discussionSee also: "Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing" https://mikemcquaid.com/open-source-maintainers-owe-you-noth...
Comment linking /open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing/
on “A letter to open-source maintainers”Submitted Ruby on (Guard)Rails as a story · 24 points
HN discussionHave you seen Strap? Strap is a script to bootstrap a minimal OS X development system. This does not assume you're doing Ruby/Rails/web development but installs the minimal set of software every OS X developer will want. http://mikemcquaid.com/2016/06/15/replacing-boxen/ https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/strap
Comment linking /2016/06/15/replacing-boxen/
on “Mac-dev-playbook – Mac setup and configuration via Ansible”Submitted Some Things Good Engineers Do as a story · 23 points
HN discussionKeep in mind that maintainers of large projects are often burned or stressed out. On top of that, the "German" guy's first language is probably not English, it's German. You can't expect for every non-native speaker to always hit the "right" tone not because they are rude, but because they translate it from another language. I think calling open source "greedy" is an antithesis and a sentiment that if repeated enoug…
Comment linking /2018/03/19/open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing/
on “Ory Hydra 1.9: Open-source Golang OAuth2 provider”Submitted Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing as a story · 14 points
HN discussionI have said the same many times here on HN. This in/famous blog post really changed my view: "Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing": https://mikemcquaid.com/open-source-maintainers-owe-you-noth...
Comment linking /open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing/
on “Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust”Submitted Two Years Building Workbrew, a Remote-First Enterprise Homebrew Startup as a story · 12 points
HN discussion> As a long-time open-source maintainer, I find all the second-guessing and armchair psychoanalysis here (not just in this comment, all over HN) about Tridge's motivations, state of mind, and so on incredibly off-putting. I agree that the entire episode is obscene, but I am also unsure of what to do here either. On some level this is the same problem movie stars run into. I agree that guessing or waxing about the mo…
Comment linking /open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing/
on “Did Claude Increase Bugs in Rsync?”Submitted Open Source Must Be Fun (Or It Will Die) as a story · 8 points
HN discussion>That negativity has been for the most part earned. No, it hasn't. It's unacceptable for you to make personal attacks calling them "shitty people" because they closed a bug report. It's unacceptable for you to demand that open source developers spend their time addressing your concerns for free. Period. End of story. This isn't up for debate and you're acting like a troll by constantly coming back on this. So I'm as…
Comment linking /entitlement-in-open-source/
on “On the Gnome Project and “My Way or the Highway””Submitted Analysing RubyGems Contribution Data with Homebrew's Tooling as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAs Mike McQuaid from Homebrew once blogged: <<Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing>>[1] There are so many blog posts like this. And, a few times a year, HN likes to rehash this topic. Open source seems like a thankless, but necessary exercise in the modern world. At this point in history, I doubt there are any strong intellectual arguments to favour closed- over open-source. (However, there are economic arguments…
Comment linking /open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing/
on “Please Don't Ask If an Open Source Project Is Dead”Submitted Sandboxes and Worktrees: My Secure Agentic AI Setup in 2026 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI maintain open source software with bugs 10 years old. It's my free time and I can choose what to prioritize and work on. Popularity can be a burden because more users lead to more support cases. https://mikemcquaid.com/2018/03/19/open-source-maintainers-o... > What you all sugest for this type problem for OS softs? If it fits your purpose use the OS software. If it doesn't (yet) then paid software (with support) l…
Comment linking /2018/03/19/open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing/
on “The problems with quality open source software”Submitted Why Open Source Maintainers Thrive in the LLM Era as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Mentorship Diamond as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Open Source Contributor Funnel (Why People Don’t Contribute to Your Project) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Vibe Coding Developer Productivity Tools as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Make GitHub Actions Do More for You as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
