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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

#71

Post by kayodelycaon »

donatj wrote: post #58
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.

Modern JavaScript grew up in the culture of “move fast, break things”. Combined with JavaScript having a limited “vocabulary” and being the new PHP, you end up with a lot of churn as people start building large applications without the tooling for it.

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

#72

Post by ptero »

One of the most important things a FOSS (and not only) engineer can do is learn to say no.

And then decide if they do it for fun, or want money. There may be some overlaps, but it should be crystal clear which is the main one. This is 100% their choice. Trying to sit on two chairs usually ends in misery.

And if they treat it as a hobby (fun) and a company, NASA or someone else needs a fix or a feature ASAP, well, they can always do it themselves. You do it if and when it works for you. The software will likely be better that way, too. My 2c.

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

#73

Post by jckahn »

CJefferson wrote: post #49
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?

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.

Nobody has any right to expect labor from an unpaid person. I get feature requests from people who make money with my OSS work (which I don’t begrudge), but unless I find the work inherently interesting to prioritize then I respectfully ask them to compensate me, make a PR, or file a GitHub feature request so that someone else can. I fix legitimate bug reports for free ASAP because I care about the quality of my work. Nobody has ever offered my compensation, despite the fact that my work has been used by millions of people. That’s fine with me though, OSS is just a hobby for me. :)

Anyone can choose this strategy, and I don’t quite understand why more OSS maintainers don’t.

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

#75

Post by hiq »

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…

Most companies are just free-riding because they can and because it makes financial sense, at least superficially. I don't see why this would change. Sometimes they get hit by the occasional security vulnerability in a badly supported dependency, but if it's commonly used in the industry the fallout will be negligible anyway, so why would they reevaluate their stance?

Companies that heavily rely on one specific FOSS project and have well-defined requests naturally get more invested in them one way or another. But even for these, which tend to be bigger tech companies with more cash, "just pay the maintainer" is a tough sell when they can just either come up with their own project (even FOSS and recoup the "losses" in proprietary IP with hiring marketing) or fork it if PRs from employees are not well-received by the maintainer.

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

#76

Post by hluska »

nisa wrote: post #61
jameshush wrote: post #38

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.

Please not. I understand that this kind of works and provides income for a lot of people but especially in the Wordpress world every plugin is just one huge piece of upsell ads with limited functionality. I don't blame the developers who do this but it's not a solution.

I wonder if there are more tasteful ways to do it.

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

#77

Post by Mc91 »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #63

I'm an open source maintainer. I have a different take. Yes many projects lack funding, but I'm hesitant to ask for funding for my projects. Because: what sort of social contract would it imply if people fund me? Should funders be elegible for faster response times? Should their feature requests be implemented with more priority, or must they guaranteed to be implemented? What are the expectations of me? Can I take a…

This is a take I have seen and don't hear often.

I depended on a FOSS project once that was mostly done by one maintainer, and would sometimes send feature or fix patches upstream. Once I sent an e-mail that I could give him hundreds of dollars for some bug bounties - his program would improve and he would make some money out of it. He said thanks but no, he made enough in his day job and only had limited time to maintain the program.

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

#78

Post by raverbashing »

rjzzleep wrote: post #59
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?

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 we…

This is an interesting aspect, and some good projects do come from Europe

But open source projects still need a roadmap, focus and maintenance, regardless of how they are funded.

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

#79

Post by clearcoat »

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?

For free? Hell no, I work for GitHub stars.

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

#80

Post by micromacrofoot »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #57
oaiey wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

and that’s borderline, a seasoned dev can find better offers at that rate… and with more benefits

senior devs easily cost a company $200k between taxes, insurance, and benefits

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