Stop freeloading off open source

Open source software is everywhere: powering web apps, supercomputers, cars, and most of the infrastructure the tech industry takes for granted. Yet the foundations holding all of this up are often small, non-profit side projects maintained by a handful of developers who do it out of pure enjoyment for building.

I know this firsthand: I maintain Quarkdown, an open source Markdown-based typesetting system. It’s grown to over 15k stars on GitHub, hit GitHub Trending a handful of times, and made the front page of Hacker News twice. That visibility is what led Falconer to reach out to me, and ultimately to me joining the team.

Being an open source maintainer changes how you see the software you depend on, you start noticing every time a user silently forks instead of contributing back. So when we hit friction, I knew exactly what kind of project we wanted to be.

What powers Falconer’s editor: Tiptap

Tiptap is the open source framework behind Falconer’s rich text editor. Built on top of ProseMirror, it handles everything a user touches when writing a document, working with the Falcon agent, or composing a comment.

Like any decently-sized project, Tiptap has its rough edges: formatting that sometimes doesn’t quite match what we need, bugs that only show up in certain structures, and controls that we expect to be different.

Our first instinct was to work around them locally by overriding and patching their behavior, as that was fast to ship and felt harmless, but, as the product grew, those little tricks added up into their own maintenance burden, harder to reason about and easy to break on the next version upgrade.

Our contribution

Instead of piling up more workarounds, we changed our approach and started fixing things at the source: opening pull requests against upstream Tiptap and letting the fix belong to the community instead of just to us. It’s slower and expensive, but once a fix lands, we get to delete our local patch, upgrade to the new version, and move on.

As an open source enthusiast, I’m proud of this direction as a way to give back to the ecosystem we depend on every day. Our first contributions are already merged and shipped, and we’re looking forward to keep at it.

A few improvements include:

• Correctly handling the behavior of the Backspace and Tab keys on list items (#7892, #7893) and block quotes (#7891)
• Refining and improving the user experience when creating and editing mathematical equations (#7787, #7788)

Being on the other side, as a maintainer watching contributors open PRs, changes how you think about it. Contributing back to Tiptap is the same thing.

Most choose the faster, invisible workaround, but I’ve been on the other side. The projects we depend on only stay healthy if enough people choose differently, and we’re trying to be part of that.