they are talking about npm maintainers only. those yippies really have a hard time because nobody needs that crap, and if so for max 5 years.
FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
111–120 of 191 posts
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#112I'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 mai…
I think your experience may be different from the psychology-of-obligation issue that the GP describes.
For someone in a stable, salaried job that pays reasonably well (assuming USA level or the better paid parts of Europe), it rarely makes financial sense to accept "hundreds of dollars" for a complex task.
That's due to the amount: "Thousands to tens of thousands" would likely get a different sort of response, assuming it sounded like a reliable offer, not a gamble.
Most FOSS bounties pay terribly if counted by the hour. I'm guessing the bounties came to "hundreds of dollars" for several days (at least) work on the developer's part, because so many other FOSS bounties do? They would have to take formal vacation from their day job to do that work, or extend their working hours to focus exclusively on your issues across many evenings or weekends, at cost to their personal life? They would have to change the way they file taxes to accomodate this payment outside the regular flow of salary? Or, if they work in a job paid by the hour already and with flexible hours, they would be getting less accepting your bounties than they make at work?
The burdens and typically low pay make it a net negative to accept small FOSS bounties, for a reasonably well-paid salaried worker, just on the basis of economic rationality. The psychology of feeling obliged to finish the project after agreeing to do it is just one more burden.
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#113I'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…
Very well said.
I maintain an open source project which is used by a few hundred companies, and I also sell a couple commercial products which enhance the functionality. I don't accept donations since I much prefer to offer well-defined commercial products instead of ill-defined donation benefits.
Despite this, I've still had users who insist I should accept donations, often claiming that I would make some absurdly unrealistic amount of money if I did so. In one case the user kept arguing with me and demanding to know more reasoning as to why I didn't want to accept his donation. Of course these same users are absolutely not interested in the well-defined paid products and always offer weird mental gymnastics as to their thinking.
I just can't relate to or understand this behavior. Do these people burst into random businesses in real life and say "Hello, I love your store but don't want to buy any of your products! I demand to know why don't you have a GoFundMe?"
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#114I've been meaning to donate more to open source and free services (e.g. archive.org).
My last contribution was $20 to libcurl. Apparently it's used on billions of devices, if only each of those device owners donated $1!
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#115OSS developers perceived some value to be gained by them, at some point they seem to be disillusioned by the outcome or don't want to pay the cost of further investment beyond what they put (and got back) thus far.
This just seems natural and could be followed by one of either
1. productise OSS project and start making money from it 2. allow other top maintainer to take the lead 3. work at some BigCo where they can afford to pay full time working on this OSS project, if that makes sense
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#116If you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen.
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.
If you intend to make things other people will use and come to depend on, you cannot have this attitude toward open source. Stop thinking in terms of hobbys and toys. You are still building serious software for mass market distribution, you just have an alternative funding model.
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#117[deleted]
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#118Open 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 can't read the article because it's paywalled, so I'll respond to this comment instead. > Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture I don't agree with that take. There was not, to my knowledge, a "volunteerism" component of either early open source or early hacking culture (though my roots only go back to about the mid-80s). The "volunteer" part came later, as there was an explicit effort…
I remember the volunteerism as being a way for non-developers, who couldn't otherwise support a project, as being able to contribute to a project: write docs, triage bug reports, answer user questions etc. so that the developers could focus on the code, which usually was to scratch their own itch that others found useful. It wasn't ever really a hard sell, just an alternative way for less- or non-technical people to participate and also shut up whiners. As open source foundations started popping up all over the place hoovering up sponsorship dollars, that's when I recall the 'hard sell' of volunteerism starting (i.e. making people feel better about scratching someone else's itch for no money... what most of us call jobs and demand payment for)
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#119[dead]
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It isn't nice though, as the maintainer. I gave up on doing any kind of open source stuff probably a decade ago for way less than screaming. Just getting bug reports is depressing, it was a relief to walk away and never have to think about it again. I know I didn't owe people anything, but hearing that I'd written buggy incomplete code (which worked and was good enough for me) sucked the joy out of it all.