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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

#81

Post by phoronixrly »

raverbashing wrote: post #78
rjzzleep wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whether a project needs those things is up to its author(s) to decide. If you don't agree with them you're welcome to fork.

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

#82

Post by singpolyma3 »

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.

Yes. Every company who needs changes in a FOSS project should fork it. Freedom is the freedom to fork, it's the whole point.

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

#83

Post by shultays »

Almost all devs that care too much about their work burns out eventually. It is just FOSS devs have higher percentage of "caring too much about their work" syndrome, to the point doing it for free.

As someone that had similar issues, I would highly suggest everyone to view their job as job. You work on the time you were supposed to, do your best within your capabilities, raise issues when you see them but that is all. Don't overwork and try not to worry so much when things are not going the way you want them to be. You can still enjoy your work, just try not to have personal attachment to it.

But I guess that is harder for FOSS devs, since the reason they work is being too attached to their projects.

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

#84

Post by rikschennink »

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…

I’m an open source maintainer that asks for donations with a basic “Buy me a cup of coffee” link.

IMHO the person donating already got something in return which is the free software + the good feeling of having donated.

I don’t offer anything in return for a donation because I also don’t want those strings attached and I feel at that point it’s no longer a donation. If I offer something in return it turns into sponsoring or simply buying services/access.

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

#85

Post by D13Fd »

pabs3 wrote: post #66
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…

I don't think funders should get any more say in or influence the direction of a project than anyone else. That should be up to the maintainer, of course taking advice from the users and contributors to the project. Funders are simply buying sustainability of the project, and that should be enough for them. This is how it works in projects like Inkscape, Krita or Debian.

Sounds like a great way to not have funders

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

#86

Post by clearcoat »

I don't think things are nearly as "broken" as these types of alarmist takes make it out to be. Quite the contrary I think FOSS is a model that other industries would do well to adopt.

People talk about companies "free riding" on FOSS, but the corollary to that is that this allows an individual developer to be massively more productive, justifying the high salaries we see. To obtain value from just about any open source project, companies need to hire developers, individual developers are in a position to benefit as the gatekeepers to all this "free" value.

Everyone is benefiting from this. Free is absolutely essential to making this work. Free is frictionless, free is equalizing. I'm not choosing between Redux over Mobx based on price, I'm choosing purely of intrinsic merits and community.

It is always easy enough to find problems, but looking over the past couple of decades, I don't think you can argue but that things keep getting better.

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

#88

Post by kayodelycaon »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #80
kayodelycaon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yup. I was assuming $200k total cost for a senior developer in the Midwest. If you want someone on the West coast, you’re easily looking at $300k for just the salary due to the cost of living being more than double.

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

#89

Post by jeltz »

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?

Yes, I like working for free. I tried doing open source work for money but the only thing that happened was that I lost all motivation. It stopped being fun and became yet another job. And I make more than enough money from my main job.

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

#90

Post by PaywallBuster »

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.

Sure 300k barely supports US market rates, but should it?

There's plenty of people working the same job for many years with low-ish salary? Sure they could find new one and get the latest high market but they haven't

I mean the project was already being developed before even having full time staff, and some contributors are not in the US and could live less for sure

many OSS projects can go a long way the same way

and that's the point, why should babel take "a big chunk" of OSS donations, while many others take nothing

and looking at another comment below, seems it's becoming irrelevant, so it would make sense to reduce funding further and let staff to move away to other projects or take full time employment at a profit making organization and take market rates.

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