Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

In other words open source as it was practiced was sustainable up until the point it got taken advantage of too much by big players not putting things back into the system. At this point it has become unsustainable.

I don't understand this argument. Nobody starts an open source project - and posts it in the open to share freely - expecting to make any money. Are there even any significant amount of projects with a donation or a Patreon page?

Webnovels I read on RoyalRoad all have it and are much more successful that I would ever have thought given that the stories are all coimpletely free and all any one who pays a story author gets is a few chapters ahead of others, but I can't remember any of the numerous OS projects I use one way or another to even try to make any money.

I did see burnout in some projects. I once joined as co-maintainer of a medium sized project and was left as the sole maintainer because the main author just up and left and was unreachable (we only heard of him again over a year later, and he never touched that particular project again).

All the stories I saw had nothing to do with money at all though, just getting fed up with the expectations. In "my" project's case it also was the large amount of complexity and technical debt that made the original owner's attempts at adding and/or refactoring a huge time sink, and he probably would have been better off to start again from scratch (it's what happens after adding more and more features in a complex cross-mobile phone platform library project's code).

None of those "disillusioned open source maintainer" stories I saw ever included any attempt of making money with it. Disappointment of not being able to get money from anyone only ever comes from people starting a commercial project (a new company), if that kind of disappointment exists for freely shared open source software then I must have missed all instances of such a thing happening.

> It has certainly 'worked great' for leeches, if you ignore bombs like this logging bug destroying Western civilization.

All of life and especially commercial life in anything slightly sophisticated or at scale is "muddling through" to some degree. The same as biological life actually.

So overall I agree with the previous statement that it worked quite well. Nobody should be called a "leech" for using projects that were meant to be shared openly and freely, given the license and method of distribution (e.g. freely on Gitlab or Github).

Building a business on a stack of other people’s hobbies isn’t sustainable. I mean, just tell that to anybody outside of tech and watch their reaction.