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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

#51

Post by marginalia_nu »

raverbashing wrote: post #44
hpcoke wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The thing is, if you aren't getting paid, people can demand all they want. Scream until their faces turn blue, stomp their feet, bawl like a baby, write mean things on twitter, stick a voodoo doll full of needles.

It's entirely your prerogative to say no.

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

#52

Post by strken »

raverbashing wrote: post #44
hpcoke wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I, and a number of other people that possibly includes you, like programming enough that we do it for free.

I don't like doing free tech support for entitled mean people on GitHub, which is what you're really asking about, but I'm perfectly happy to throw code over the fence for the general public to use if they don't bother me about it.

What happens if the log4j developers just... don't fix the bug? Other people who rely on the library fork it, development continues with more funding, the world keeps turning, and maybe a few tens of millions of dollars of additional economic damage are inflicted in a diffuse fashion across the global tech industry.

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

#53

Post by goodpoint »

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 early hacking culture is the Free Software culture and copyleft.

For the last decades it has been coopted by corporations and especially SaaS.

Now a lot of FOSS is either corporate-driven or... unpaid labor for SaaS companies.

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

#54

Post by jan_Inkepa »

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.

Germany has government funding/grants available for open source projects. (I haven't looked into it in detail because of a dislike of paperwork).

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

#55

Post by jltsiren »

FiloSottile wrote: post #24
jdrc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> 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.

That's not a consequence of grant funding itself. The traditional academic career path jumps directly from a trainee to a manager, and managers have to do what managers do.

Larger research institutes have positions for professional researchers. Those researchers don't have to spend that much time on grant writing, unless they want to become managers or they are trying to remain competitive for positions in the traditional PI-centric academia.

That's a key lesson for FOSS. If the development is funded by grants and donations, the organization should be large enough that every senior developer doesn't have to become a manager.

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

#56

Post by antattack »

Recent security incidents have shown how quick open-source is to address vulnerabilities compared to closed source.

It has shown that FOSS does not come w/o a cost (open-source does not mean free) and it's advantageous and necessary for companies to support FOSS financially.

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

#57

Post by kayodelycaon »

oaiey wrote: post #10
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 a massive project which at a point was key for any web project. And 300k is good for how many full time people. In the US maybe 3? Not that I have any insights, but we should never forget, that we stand on the shoulders of Giants. And the giant is overall massively underpaid.

Probably closer to 1.5 people in the US. Unless they have some means of getting health insurance for free and not paying taxes on their income.

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

#58

Post by donatj »

RedShift1 wrote: post #27

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.

I don’t understand the sheer volume of major version increments in JS projects. Avoiding breaking changes should be one of your main goals as a developer, yet I swear some libraries have major version increments multiple times per month.

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

#59

Post by rjzzleep »

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?

In my opinion Filo is completely off base. It's the Americanization of Open Source. Notice some of the OSS conferences in the US are big sponsored events by O'reilly, to some extent big recruiting events.

Contrast that to FOSDEM, which is completely different. This isn't just an offspring of early hacker culture. This is as offspring of how "socialist" european university systems were.

A lot of bigger OSS projects were started during peoples university time and what's so fundamentally different between how universities in Europe were before? You didn't have care about graduating. Some people stayed in University for 10 years, it was free and sometimes even had some benefits, like cheaper healthcare.

Now studying forever subsidized isn't always a good thing, but it has some nice side effects, like being able to work on your side project without having to worry about your livelihood(something that is unthinkable in the US).

The European higher ed systems has gotten more and more close to the US system with the Bologna process[1].

Most Americans immediately think about how to monetize things, and don't get me wrong, being able to live off of your open source project is nice, but it wasn't the focus in the past.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_Process

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