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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

#41

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

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…

Isn’t what you’re describing just the business model of open core companies like Confluent, or MySQL -> MariaDB? The intermediaries tend to grow large for successful open source projects, because there’s a lot of money to be made, but it’s not uncommon in my experience for the core maintainers of a project to go found a company around it. If it’s just an awareness thing, by all means, let’s make sure open source maintainers know this is an option available to them.

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

#42

Post by yakak »

apatters wrote: post #31
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.

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)…

There's nothing wrong with a consulting model yet I wouldn't use code under their direct/complete control. Plenty of Apache Projects have members that are in consultant companies, their willingness to make changes for cash is balanced by other orgs that only want to contribute directly, ensure existing functionality, etc.

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

#43

Post by raverbashing »

Join (from the part of the developer) idealistic goals, rose tinted glasses, naiveté, with (from the part of the users/contributors) lack of respect, lack of project visibility, lack of tact in dealing with OSS maintainers, sometimes lack of technical prowess and too much initiative, and the environment is set for conflict.

No wonder most people give up.

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

#44

Post by raverbashing »

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?

Well, you tell us, based on your experience.

Do you like working for free? Do you like people making unreasonable demands?

How would you like spending the weekend like the log4j people trying to solve a Prio 0 bug?

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

#45

Post by weego »

FiloSottile wrote: post #20
throwaways85989 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, what, this is not a kitchen. This is a hobby project, a child-toy-kitchen, some people seem to mistaken a a career. Patch is welcome and if you want software work for free, fork it and do your own work on it.

Is that really the outcome we want? That large companies fork all the OSS they need and take control away from the maintainers? Because it's what is going to happen if we don't build an alternative where maintainers have a proper career path.

They're in control of the license from the very start. Anyone who doesn't want that doesn't need to use a license that is so open.

I like most others' careers has been deeply enriched by open source, but I find it hard to have sympathy for anyone releasing under a very open license and then pulling a pikachu face when their project is used within the boundaries of how it is offered.

This same discussion has previously devolved to 'well projects with non-liberal licenses don't tend to get traction', the answer to which is there's a false assumption here that every oss project should trend towards adoption. That should never be the primary goal and is one of the main pillars of why the entire ecosystem is becoming dysfunctional.

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

#46

Post by Leherenn »

akvadrako wrote: post #35
amelius wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your average citizen probably doesn't know what open source is, let alone could name one project.

So most likely most people would not give anything because they don't know/care, and a few marketable projects (like VLC) would get most of the rest, way more than they need.

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

#47

Post by asah »

ahartmetz wrote: post #8
throwaways85989 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, what, this is not a kitchen. This is a hobby project, a child-toy-kitchen, some people seem to mistaken a a career. Patch is welcome and if you want software work for free, fork it and do your own work on it.

The kitchen is real because it produces real food that real people choose to eat. But it is indeed not much of a career, usually .

Y, but open source contribution IS a decent addition to one's resume.

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

#49

Post by CJefferson »

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?

I think it's fine when you are doing open source for fun, and for other individual users.

If a company is basing their livelihood on your library, they should (in my opinion) be supporting it somehow -- either by paying you, or paying someone to keep an eye on new versions.

The other choice is they are trusting you to fix bugs and not be malicious, which isn't (in my opinion) reasonable, as you get nothing in return.

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

#50

Post by cryptica »

PaywallBuster wrote: post #6

makes you wonder, babel say they can't live with 300k a year in funding but the 1000s of projects used by 1000s of devs to build 1000s of things barely get 10$ a month or even a year OSS donations should be more fairly distributed, not power law, rock star levels, where 1 project can get more funding than 99% of projects.

Babel is now a less-than-useless project. It's a hack; which, like most hacks, was kind of useful when it first came out but was supposed to have a short shelf life. It only became popular because its creator was hired by Facebook and was promoted heavily to developers. IMO, it had no use outside of Facebook or any large corporation... Updating code to make use of the latest language feature at a later time is not difficult at all unless you have millions of lines of code; and even then, it can be automated to some extent.

People should simply stick to the slightly older JS syntax while waiting for new versions of JS to reach mass adoption... Essentially all of the new features add very little value nowadays (mostly cosmetic value)... Surely you can wait 5 years or so... There hasn't been any significant 'must have' feature since async/await anyway. It's not worth adding 100+ Babel tooling dependencies and sub-dependencies to your project and adding a transpilation step just to reduce your project's code size by 2% (that's what cosmetic changes to ECMAScript are about really)... Just use the older feature; this is the most compatible approach.

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