Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
blog.filippo.io
Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
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Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#2Unpopular opinion:
Maybe there is nothing wrong with the "status quo", maybe we don't need yet another attempt to finance small FOSS projects where it's hard to explain how money will actually solve any of these issues.
Maybe people just need to be more considerate of what they depend upon. And in the case that a popular yet well maintained project has a CVE on day, maybe we need to accept that popularity does not make them invulnerable to bugs, all software has bugs.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#3Side note: dang there are salary discrepancies in the SWE community.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#4well written.
One thought: i disagree with the classification of (senior) software engineer.
i think it’s more comparable to a VP of Engineering in a company with n engineers (n = count of committers/involved), so salary estimate are even higher.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#5Please define "unsustainable".
It has worked great for decades, both for the free market side, and for the FOSS community.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#6Unpopular opinion: Maybe there is nothing wrong with the "status quo", maybe we don't need yet another attempt to finance small FOSS projects where it's hard to explain how money will actually solve any of these issues. Maybe people just need to be more considerate of what they depend upon. And in the case that a popular yet well maintained project has a CVE on day, maybe we need to accept that popularity does not ma…
"Being considerate" and "accepting" can't fix bugs. Time and money can fix bugs. We need to get these projects more time and more money.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#7Side note: dang there are salary discrepancies in the SWE community.
There are salary discrepancies everywhere in the world. If you mean the salaries across countries, you're comparing apples and oranges. €100k in Berlin goes much further than $100k in Houston (a random big city in the US, I don't think Berlin is comparable to NYC)
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#8Everything stated about the risks and current deficiencies is true. Meanwhile the OP works for Google on OSS, one of the "untenable" approaches to funding it that is lamented. Nothing else presented is close to an alternative solution; there's no "ask" that would fix the situation, let alone an attempt to lead by example, so what's the point of this post?
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#9Please define "unsustainable". It has worked great for decades, both for the free market side, and for the FOSS community.
At the very least, it's unsustainable to maintainers as people, because many are burning out (I have no data, so this is an assumption).
As a result, it's also unsustainable to other coders because the OSS ecosystem grows replete with broken and stale code that is no longer maintained and which creates cognitive cost to ignore/prune.
Both might grow in a non-linear fashion, which would be really bad news.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#10>But! Maintainers need to be legible to the big company department that approves and processes those invoices.
I imagine this could be a hard sell to people who just want to build some cool software and maintain it. Setting up an account, okay, that may be possible, but that's not the end of it. Companies pay invoices FOR something. That something means contracts, potentially about substantial sums, that means getting legal support to navigate said contracts & obligations.