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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

#131

Post by pcthrowaway »

evanelias wrote: post #113
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…

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 u…

I understand why you structure things the way you do, but I can speak for myself in a hypothetical scenario where I had money (now) to donate to an open source project that offers paid features. I might be concerned about paying for the paid features, because if I become reliant on them and then my capability to pay for them changes in the future, I'm now in an unfortunate position of having to re-write the features I've grown dependent on, or rewriting other parts of my codebase to remove the reliance on those features (a big refactor later can be more costly than planning properly in the first place)

I might then prefer to just use the open source version, and donate when I can, to avoid accidentally becoming dependent on something that I'm not confident of my ability to afford later.

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

#132

Post by yeetsfromhell »

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…

Part of a workable solution might be to incentivize companies funding the FOSS they depend on. Tax incentives and the like. Developers only get so much say, get the beancounters involved.

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

#133

Post by jrm4 »

yakak wrote: post #19
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 recent elementary OS melt down shows the problem with this path. Creating a business to act as a middle man creates a situation where no one can reach the people who want to do maintenance because business interests will develop and want to hold the code hostage. It is better to form non-profits that hire maintainers.

Said it elsewhere, Elementary's problem is that "Desktop OS" is a deceptively stupid business model. "The Desktop" was essentially solved about 20 years ago, but Microsoft and Apple are powerful and interested enough to really screw around with them in a way to make it seem like this is not the case.

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

#134

Post by indigochill »

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.

The dead simple solution to this nobody is talking about is to fork it. If you want to ensure that some random stranger (our friendly FOSS maintainer) isn't going to sabotage your product, the only solution short of negotiating a support contract with them (which some FOSS developers are not amenable to) is to bring that software internal. You still benefit from FOSS because you get a huge head-start from all the up-front work, but software maintenance going forward should be the responsibility of the user of that software, not of some random stranger.

But commercially this is unpopular because it means that companies have to actually account for the cost of maintaining a complex software stack instead of pretending all the open source dependencies maintain themselves.

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

#135

Post by pengaru »

hiq wrote: post #75
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…

> "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.

Also "just pay the maintainer" doesn't contribute towards most managers' primary goal of empire-building. In my experience even getting individual contractors paid for work can be a tough sell, managers want headcount and the opportunity to abuse their minions.

A "maintainer" receiving funds somewhere on the internet to play in their sandbox just looks like enabling escape from management's prison.

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

#136

Post by tarsinge »

simon1ltd wrote: post #109
tarsinge wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody has any right to expect labor from an unpaid person. I'm very grateful for OSS projects and maintainers but this is an interesting question: is doing something for free a free pass for false promises (advertising)? If I commit to help someone for free I then have a responsibility to show up. If an OSS developer advertise their projects as production ready then they have a responsibility to honor what is prom…

Yes, it is possible to have it both ways. Your reliance on something isn't material when trying to get support from someone you're not paying. Full stop. Maybe it's important to you and maybe people you support -- but that has nothing to do with your right to make demands against someone who put their work out there for free. If you need a guaranteed support model, you either do it yourself or hire a company to provi…

Sure I don’t disagree, I think I was too broad. I’m talking about only a subset of projects that are not just free work put out there, but actively promoted as some serious building block with a business agenda behind like personal brand building. There is OSS and OSS, I’m not talking about FreeBSD, Linux or PostgreSQL types, but projects that are part of a company marketing strategy or resume building and kind of white lie about their seriousness. My issue is with marketing, promises and expectations, and not OSS as it is to its roots. Edit: for a concrete example, I agree with you in the case of say curl, but not for React.

Also tangentially I don’t buy into the binary distinction “it’s free it can be poison I can’t complain / I paid it’s my right to be an entitled asshole”. The cost is irrelevant with the promise for me, the first cent doesn’t have magical entitlement, and its absence is not a free pass to (white) lie.

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

#138

Post by misslibby »

simon1ltd wrote: post #109
tarsinge wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody has any right to expect labor from an unpaid person. I'm very grateful for OSS projects and maintainers but this is an interesting question: is doing something for free a free pass for false promises (advertising)? If I commit to help someone for free I then have a responsibility to show up. If an OSS developer advertise their projects as production ready then they have a responsibility to honor what is prom…

Yes, it is possible to have it both ways. Your reliance on something isn't material when trying to get support from someone you're not paying. Full stop. Maybe it's important to you and maybe people you support -- but that has nothing to do with your right to make demands against someone who put their work out there for free. If you need a guaranteed support model, you either do it yourself or hire a company to provi…

Who has the right to make demands against FOSS developers? Have any FOSS developers been successfully sued and forced to implement something?

Obviously they should be careful when picking the license, but with any of the standard licenses, they should be fine?

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

#139

Post by [deleted] »

indigochill wrote: post #134
CJefferson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The dead simple solution to this nobody is talking about is to fork it. If you want to ensure that some random stranger (our friendly FOSS maintainer) isn't going to sabotage your product, the only solution short of negotiating a support contract with them (which some FOSS developers are not amenable to) is to bring that software internal. You still benefit from FOSS because you get a huge head-start from all the up-…

[deleted]

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

#140

Post by misslibby »

OMG - another one for the annals of ridiculous feminist claims:

"The free nature of open source also leads to inequity. Open source is dominated by men, and people who don't have as much leisure time or stability might be less likely to contribute to open source when there's no compensation involved."

So an article lamenting the horrible lives of FOSS open source developers who work for almost nothing then turns around and blames the same OS developers for driving women out of tech by working for free.

Never mind that women tend to be paid by their husbands, so they would have lots of spare time for FOSS development.

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