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

If you want a real project then you need those

If you just want to share code, that's fine as well, but that's not an OSS project (sure, it can be an open source "project" - but not a project that grows)

That would pivot a lot of those merch and drop-shipping hawkers on YouTube to “here’s how to make your own FOSS library and collect your friends’ €100!”

We’d get a lot more of “things that qualify for the €100”, but it’s not clear that we’d get a lot more useful FOSS.

Babel should get however much of the donations as people want to donate to it. If other projects want more donations, they should be looking to users of their project, not to users of babel.

If babel users become unhappy, the pace of donations will decrease naturally. That’s a good thing, IMO.

Personally, I don’t really sympathize with the “sabotage” stuff. To me, that’s just immature. Nobody can stop you from quitting out, archiving or deleting repos, etc. but choosing the route of trying to use your influence to try to cause harm is not helpful to anyone and only serves to mess up your reputation (and to a degree, the reputation of all of us maintaining open source projects.)

I am yet again still annoyed by how the “problem” here is portrayed. Open source doesn’t need to be “sustainable” for anything in particular. I like open source because I can work on anything I want, and other interested parties can join. I also work for money, and in that case, I don’t get to work on whatever I want to.

The problem of internet entitlement is also not unique to open source devs. I’m sure I am not the only one here who has ran internet communities of various sorts, and that, too, can be quite rough. Possibly even worse sometimes.

I do sympathize with people who can’t mentally deal with the stress, because after all, people are only human and I think they have only good intentions at heart. But if you are feeling overwhelmed by your successful projects, I think it may be necessary to step back and make sure you’re still in it for the right reasons.

Because big tech companies depend on open source, it is often seen as a problem that open source code is mostly unfunded… but frankly, that only matters if you care about the fate of the tech companies more than the open source communities. I say fuck it; Google can fork whatever project if it goes unmaintained. I wouldn’t really want my project to be controlled or influenced by Google, Facebook or Microsoft, but if they get no such influence, exactly what incentive do they have to support the original maintainers instead of forking it for themselves?

I think the "critical software industry" story is fascinating and if research does not already exist in these areas let's fund more of it:

1. Let's baseline the usage and spread first. What code is used, where and by whom. It ought to be possible to get complete pictures of this most large orgs scan their whole estate constantly - but publishing it academically?

1.a. A central "phone home" FOSS library that everyone "trusts" will just report the minimum might be a good idea here.

2. So if we know what codebase are critical we can then ask are they supported? Are the top five contributors paid in connection with the code base? Lots of ways of finding this about but email or bug requests is most likely winners.

3. A move I think is a good idea is to have some form of "Foss Tech Support Mesh" Library X is really useful, so several ISVs announce they support it, understand it etc. Maybe if an ISV account gets a commit accepted they get a badge. This will start to bridge the gap between volunteers and paid positions.

while we are at it, what is the proprietary story? I am pretty sure Facebook has funds to keep its codebase updated, but there were MRI Scanner companies that cannot afford to move off windows XP, so there is bound to be a grey area of for profit companies producing code at not much more than subsistence level.