> it's putting the entire internet at risk
Mike Monteiro: F*ck You, Pay Me - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U
FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
151–160 of 191 posts
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#152Open 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'd like to see FOSS funded in the same way as science.
In many ways it was (and is). Many research projects are government funded and produce FOSS. The entire industrial/academic space surrounding the development of Unix, sharing of source code tapes, and the emergence of RMS and GNU were running primarily on government funding. The long-running jokes about Linux and beowulf clusters were echoes of the actual government funding driving many activities where FOSS interface with computational science.
Now, you might have the mistaken idea that science or other R&D funding is easy to access like ticking a box on a tax form. No, you need lots of bureaucratic support and so to work under government funding is to get a job in a university or other research lab that is equipped to chase, win, and collect government funding. Your position is "soft money" and depends on either you (as a principal investigator) or your boss engaging this constant struggle to win the next contract that keeps you from losing funding and your position. Some of this money splashes around to student workers, graduate students, postdocs, or interns. A lot is spent on more permanent, full-time faculty and staff as well as other infrastructure and administration.
The big shift I have seen in my ~25 year career is that the industrial participants in this environment have shifted from being primarily government-contract focused to being consumer-focused. The whole cloud/internet revolution has brought these new corporations who no longer depend first and foremost on government grants from the science or defense research complex. Earlier, we also saw shifts with enterprise, B2B-focused corporations and vendors, but I think they often had more overlap with the traditional government funding sources and also blended in a little more.
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to see FOSS funded in the same way as science.
I would not. Science funding is pretty terrible, decided by politicians or groups the politicians choose who suit their interests. I would suggest something more distributed, like giving each citizen €100 a month they can allocate to FOSS.
Not all science is taxed directly by governents based on politician's whims.
FOSS could be funded by global (non-national) consortium
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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…
You have no leverage. What are you going to do stop buying their products causing them to go out of business?
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#155I 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 sou…
> free is equalizing
On the contrary, SaaS company are advantaged at exploiting FOSS and this is creating increasing inequality in access to software, hardware, knowledge/skill, markets and capital.
In short, FAANGs and SaaS take all.
There's a reason why progressive taxation and public funding has been invented: infrastructure that benefits everybody need to be paid according to income.
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For me, getting bug reports and feature requests is actually fun and makes the project more interesting. It is telling me that someone uses my software seriously and the bug was worth reporting. Many people don't report bugs because it takes some effort.
It can be, yeah, it just ground me down in the end. Deciding to stop was a huge weight off, I can only imagine the stress someone running a big successful project must feel.
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#157Earlier 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-…
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Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to see FOSS funded in the same way as science.
I would not. Science funding is pretty terrible, decided by politicians or groups the politicians choose who suit their interests. I would suggest something more distributed, like giving each citizen €100 a month they can allocate to FOSS.
Normal people don't care about FOSS or even know what it is.
They would probably use that 100 on food or fuel.
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#159Personally, 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…
> I wouldn’t really want my project to be controlled or influenced by Google, Facebook or Microsoft
Yet there are tons of developers using Angular, React, and Typescript
Re: FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
#160Personally, 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…
> I wouldn’t really want my project to be controlled or influenced by Google, Facebook or Microsoft Yet there are tons of developers using Angular, React, and Typescript
I don’t consider this to be giving up control; I use open source projects from corporations by choice, mostly due to their merits. This is a mutual thing.
On the other hand, having a big corp take over the direction of something I’m writing for fun to fit their needs is a totally different ball game.
After all, many developers also use Windows or macOS, and that can have an impact, too. But for the most part, it’s inconsequential.
The way I see it, open source is not different from freeware in this sort of way. If you release something out to the world under some set of terms, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people adhere to those terms. You also aren’t owed anything for being nice or giving people gifts. If you really care about getting a return on your investment, then I can only say that open source is a strategically shitty choice.
Open source gives me the rare opportunity to work on stuff I actually care about, with other people who also happen to care about those things. Mutual benefit. For corporations that release software, it’s not really about autonomy, but it is still about mutual benefit; Facebook was even honest with this, mentioning that a reason for opening up React was to help make it more general and mature, and help flush out idiosyncrasies that plague the design.