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FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects

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Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects

#21

Post by jdrc »

FiloSottile wrote: post #16

Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture and of what makes the Internet special: people choose to experiment and share their work, and their work can reach every corner of the world. It has no significant parallel in other industries, it's beautiful, and I owe it my career. However, it's not a sustainable, fair, or effective foundation for an industry with the responsibility to power modern…

It was also a way to overcome national and economic barriers that would exist if they e.g. set a price for the software.

Actually it does have a parallel in most sciences and engineering, academic publishing

Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects

#23

Post by FiloSottile »

yakak wrote: post #19
FiloSottile wrote: post #16

Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture and of what makes the Internet special: people choose to experiment and share their work, and their work can reach every corner of the world. It has no significant parallel in other industries, it's beautiful, and I owe it my career. However, it's not a sustainable, fair, or effective foundation for an industry with the responsibility to power modern…

The recent elementary OS melt down shows the problem with this path. Creating a business to act as a middle man creates a situation where no one can reach the people who want to do maintenance because business interests will develop and want to hold the code hostage. It is better to form non-profits that hire maintainers.

I'm arguing against middleman businesses, not for.

I don't see the non-profit model scaling to the whole industry, and the examples we have today of non-profit foundations mostly don't pay maintainers. For example, Log4j is under the Apache Foundation but none of the developers on its committee were being paid.

Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects

#24

Post by FiloSottile »

jdrc wrote: post #21
FiloSottile wrote: post #16

Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture and of what makes the Internet special: people choose to experiment and share their work, and their work can reach every corner of the world. It has no significant parallel in other industries, it's beautiful, and I owe it my career. However, it's not a sustainable, fair, or effective foundation for an industry with the responsibility to power modern…

It was also a way to overcome national and economic barriers that would exist if they e.g. set a price for the software. Actually it does have a parallel in most sciences and engineering, academic publishing

Academic publishing is a very interesting parallel to think about, indeed!

In particular the fact that often when a publication turns out to have industry value, a company is formed around it to commercialize it: both to extract profit from it, and to make it accessible and legible by companies. Companies by and large don't take academic papers off arXiv and implement them.

The rest are funded through grants, which have the side effect of directing a sizeable chunk of the academics time to writing grant applications rather than science. I think that would be a regrettable outcome for Open Source.

Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects

#25

Post by schleck8 »

cheschire wrote: post #15

Okay but how many FOSS projects decide to pivot like Ukuu did and just drop the F? If the free is killing you, stop being free. Leave your free repo as is, add a link to your purchase page for future versions. Where’s the problem? People seem hell bent on sticking to core principles until their dying breath, but that’s not healthy. Edit: and before people start laying into me about free as in speech/beer, this articl…

> Leave your free repo as is

> Where’s the problem?

People will just fork it (e. g. Retro -> Metro with all premium features)

Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects

#26

Post by yakak »

FiloSottile wrote: post #23
yakak wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent elementary OS melt down shows the problem with this path. Creating a business to act as a middle man creates a situation where no one can reach the people who want to do maintenance because business interests will develop and want to hold the code hostage. It is better to form non-profits that hire maintainers.

I'm arguing against middleman businesses, not for. I don't see the non-profit model scaling to the whole industry, and the examples we have today of non-profit foundations mostly don't pay maintainers. For example, Log4j is under the Apache Foundation but none of the developers on its committee were being paid.

Elementary OS as a business was the two initial maintainers and that fell apart pretty spectacularly, plus a lot of the work was really not theirs they were just a distribution.

Apache's model is the traditional one which isn't aggressive enough. Linux foundation is more aggressive about offering lessons as products etc. I'm not as happy with LF' model as the hippie model but it is better than devolving into no new work causing no one to donate because ex-maintainers are supposed to have vesting future stock, etc.

Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects

#27

Post by RedShift1 »

Part of the problem is probably the high amount of churn. In the Javascript world this is absolutely ridiculous, people just can't seem to leave things alone and it causes a cascading effect, where one developer makes an API change and suddenly thousands of developers have to deal with a change that typically brings them no benefit. It's pretty much a self-inflicted wound.

Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects

#28

Post by [deleted] »

cheschire wrote: post #15

Okay but how many FOSS projects decide to pivot like Ukuu did and just drop the F? If the free is killing you, stop being free. Leave your free repo as is, add a link to your purchase page for future versions. Where’s the problem? People seem hell bent on sticking to core principles until their dying breath, but that’s not healthy. Edit: and before people start laying into me about free as in speech/beer, this articl…

[deleted]

Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects

#30

Post by amelius »

FiloSottile wrote: post #16

Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture and of what makes the Internet special: people choose to experiment and share their work, and their work can reach every corner of the world. It has no significant parallel in other industries, it's beautiful, and I owe it my career. However, it's not a sustainable, fair, or effective foundation for an industry with the responsibility to power modern…

I'd like to see FOSS funded in the same way as science.
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