Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 191 posts

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

#31

Post by apatters »

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.

Elementary's problem is it has two inexperienced founders who aren't negotiating with each other very well, I'd hardly call it a meltdown, nor particularly relevant to the examples in this article.

The entrepreneur in me will never understand this problem: "programmer creates world famous software used by Microsoft and NASA and doesn't make any money and is burning out from all the work."

Here are your solutions:

1) If the users want support, charge them for it. Split the proceeds with someone who will actually do the support. If it's still too much work, raise the price.

2) If the users want features, charge them money to put those features on your roadmap. If they're asking for features you don't want to add, just raise the price or say no until they go away.

Here is what will happen when you ask for money: people you don't want to deal with will disappear. Also you'll have more money, and you will work less.

Do you need to think about business a bit somewhere in there, sure, but probably a lot less than most people think. The "business side" for the Grunt guy could probably be "register an LLC online then get an Upwork account and let them handle the other shit like your payments and tax forms for 5%." Yes, fucking Upwork.

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

#32

Post by hpcoke »

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…

> We need the critical role of Open Source maintainer to professionalize.

Do we? I do open source work and maintainership, and am happy that this is outside the control and influence of industry.

Must even this that "makes the Internet special" also bow to industry needs?

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

#33

Post by zorr »

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…

Thank you for these blog posts. One thing that isn't immediately clear to me is how one should start a new open source library (before there is any traction) to be prepared for this structure of maintainership.

For example, I'm already a freelance developer with (my countries equivalent of) an LLC and I send invoices to my clients for my work. I'm also in the process of writing a few libraries in the mobile/desktop/web shared-code space that I want to release as open source. Should I just mention this on the projects Github and website properties? A simple "contact me for an invoice" link and process the invoices/payments manually? Is there a platform a la Github sponsors/Patreon that is compatible with this workflow?

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

#34

Post by natmaka »

There is at least a project aiming at specifying a protocol (and at developing associated tools) defining how developers can be paid, in order to let users support what they use (even through dependencies) according to their will and without too much of a burden.

https://openfare.dev/

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

#35

Post by akvadrako »

amelius wrote: post #30
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.

I would not. Science funding is pretty terrible, decided by politicians or groups the politicians choose who suit their interests.

I would suggest something more distributed, like giving each citizen €100 a month they can allocate to FOSS.

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

#36

Post by bachmeier »

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 can't read the article because it's paywalled, so I'll respond to this comment instead.

> Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture

I don't agree with that take. There was not, to my knowledge, a "volunteerism" component of either early open source or early hacking culture (though my roots only go back to about the mid-80s). The "volunteer" part came later, as there was an explicit effort to emphasize open source as free as in free labor. What I used to see was openness in the sense of knowing what the code did and being able to make changes if you want. It was more of scratching your own itch and letting others play with the code if they wanted.

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

#37

Post by FiloSottile »

hpcoke wrote: post #32
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…

> We need the critical role of Open Source maintainer to professionalize. Do we? I do open source work and maintainership, and am happy that this is outside the control and influence of industry. Must even this that "makes the Internet special" also bow to industry needs?

The alternative is not the status quo. Look at all the talk of supply chain security from the big players. The alternative is that all power and profit is just moved to large institutional middlemen or directly to a few big companies who can afford such a program.

If you don't care about control over the downstream of your project, or funding, no one is forcing you to professionalize! I just want that to be available as an option to those who do.

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

#38

Post by jameshush »

I like what the React Training guys did with react-router: use the organic traffic from their library fuel their training business.

Treat the FOSS project as your lead funnel, then sell a service to those leads.

Maybe the service is training, maybe it's hosting the project (e.g Wordpress), perhaps it’s just leveraging it to get a lucrative job offer. You need to sell a service though on top of the project itself.

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

#39

Post by FiloSottile »

bachmeier wrote: post #36
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 can't read the article because it's paywalled, so I'll respond to this comment instead. > Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture I don't agree with that take. There was not, to my knowledge, a "volunteerism" component of either early open source or early hacking culture (though my roots only go back to about the mid-80s). The "volunteer" part came later, as there was an explicit effort…

I agree! I think Open Source volunteerism is the result of that culture, not its embodiment.

No other industry had a large portion of its R&D done by people scratching their own itch and sharing the results freely. That led to relying on that freely available work, which led to volunteerism.

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

#40

Post by FiloSottile »

zorr wrote: post #33
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…

Thank you for these blog posts. One thing that isn't immediately clear to me is how one should start a new open source library (before there is any traction) to be prepared for this structure of maintainership. For example, I'm already a freelance developer with (my countries equivalent of) an LLC and I send invoices to my clients for my work. I'm also in the process of writing a few libraries in the mobile/desktop/w…

Honestly, I can't give you an actionable plan at the moment. We are simply not there yet.

Eventually I hope there will be social norms (like how you advertise the option), tools (like payment rails and platforms, hopefully not like Patreon, but more like those lawyers use to invoice clients), resources, and even training. I hope it will become a standard transaction, that companies have processes for approving with no ad-hoc work.

But for now, whoever wants to try this is in uncharted territory, will have to discover what works by trial and error, will have to teach companies how to think about them, and will need some significant leverage to spend (such as personal networks, visible projects, and savings).

Post reply on HN