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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

#161

Post by jka »

jka wrote: post #144
FiloSottile wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is not the status quo. Look at all the talk of supply chain security from the big players. The alternative is that all power and profit is just moved to large institutional middlemen or directly to a few big companies who can afford such a program. If you don't care about control over the downstream of your project, or funding, no one is forcing you to professionalize! I just want that to be available…

I worry that if the majority of open source contributors professionalize, then we're left with something that resembles top-down directed corporate work (and an absence of a lot of the freedom that draws people towards developing free and open source software in the first place). Proprietary and corporate players are equally useless at securing their supply chains; I don't love that (from my perspective) they're now…

Anticipating a counter-argument: wouldn't individuals become the arbiters of the software functionality that is developed, if all open source software was based on a sponsor model? Isn't that more democratic?

Perhaps; some financial statistics that I'd suggest to consider would be:

- As of June 2018, U.S. households in the 0-40% income-level group had $0 median savings[1]

- From the same source: the median savings for a household in the U.S. is approximately $11k. There are approximately 120m households in the U.S. according to the U.S. Government census[2].

- As of 2022, thirteen firms from within the S&P 500 hold a combined $1 trillion in cash-on-reserve[3]

And yep, it'd be sensible to debate whether individuals or companies would be more likely to influence the direction of software; it's a disingenuous comparison to draw in that regard.

But even if we consider only individual citizens, there would still be significant disenfranchisement in dollar-voting ability.

[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/27/heres-how-much-money-america...

[2] - https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/HSD410219

[3] - https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-compa...

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

#162

Post by watwut »

tarsinge wrote: post #102
jckahn wrote: post #73

Earlier 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…

Majority of OSS has clear disclaimer that project is provided as is. It is right there, in the license.

Take it or leave it. Which works for the other side complainers too. The worm is available to be used for free by companies, because license said so.

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

#163

Post by DiabloD3 »

misslibby wrote: post #140

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 arou…

Both what you quote and what you said are both asinine: I've met a lot of female FOSS developers, several of them have worked their ways into management positions at major companies. The era of pretending FOSS is a sausage party is over, and the use of this as a talking point needs to end.

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

#164

Post by wmf »

rjzzleep wrote: post #59
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?

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…

Do European students run critical infrastructure? Because that's where the real problem is.

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

#165

Post by wmf »

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…

Maybe liability would encourage some changes. If you pay the maintainer they are liable for security vulnerabilities but if you don't pay then you are liable.

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

#166

Post by rjzzleep »

wmf wrote: post #164
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…

Do European students run critical infrastructure? Because that's where the real problem is.

How about Linux? KDE and by extension WebKit/Blink(KHTML)?

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

#167

Post by UncleEntity »

CannisterFlux wrote: post #120
marginalia_nu wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Just getting bug reports is depressing…

I’ve always found people are reasonably happy when I send them big reports — though I always either send a fix or, if I can’t figure it out on my own, a test program that demonstrates the problem.

The last time was for some random library I was writing a python wrapper for and the author seemed way too happy to be getting a bug report for the code he based his master’s thesis on. Pretty amusing to be perfectly honest.

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

#169

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#170

Post by graderjs »

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…

At the same time I think there exists an opportunity to bring the ordering and structuring function of transactions to the open source marketplace.

And I don't think the donations are subscription model really works for the reasons you enunciate meaning that everything is too unspecified, yet there are definite implicit expectations of some sort of transaction or exchange. The non-specified nature contributes a lot I think to inefficiency as well as to stress for both sides of that marketplace. It's only one of the factors that makes changes in open source currently not ideal.

With current models, even if you do specify it it acts maybe in a sort of way like a patreon model which doesn't really make sense in open source which has almost unlimited number of discrete continuously redefining tiny tasks.

The way I see payments working is more as a formalization of your choice to say yes or no to things so basically like okay here's sort of like my minimum fee or here's what I'm quoting to take a look at this. There's no guarantee that you know the entire issue that is unspecified and that could balloon into multiple future directions is going to be solved by this but here's the amount which I need right now to take a look at the next step.

Some people might view that as a way for them to make money or extract value or get reward for themselves out of their projects that is sort of tied realistically to the actual demand that people are prepared to put their money where their mouths are.

Whereas other people might see it simply as a way ensure they do not get overwhelmed by allowing the market to decide priorities, and provided down regulator or gatekeeper on the amount of incoming work. The filtration function happens before the requester even makes the request ideally because then once the expectation for the transaction occurring sometimes is established requesters may think more about steps they could take themselves other than operating in a more depending on demanding way. Possibly anyway.

For the creator, you can formalize your no by putting a price in front of it saying it'll cost you this much for me to take a look at it. But the thing is the person who made the request isn't the only person looking at that issue presumably and they don't have to be the one that pays that through.

Anyway I just just an experimental idea. The real interesting thing and where the meat is here is like how do you structure these sort of micro transactions, that sells problems on both sides of that marketplace. In other words you're allow developers to exercise more control over their incoming workflow which is a key driver of happiness you provide the opportunity for them to get rewarded for their open source efforts in a way that's actually tied to specific toss rather than a nebulous sort of funders model or sponsors model, and you provide a bit more like clarity and definition for requesters you know to think well is it really worth it to me to to make this request and how much am I prepared to kind of you know put up to have this creator I take a look at the next step for me.

I think there's multiple ways you could configure bringing the ordering and structuring function of transactions to the open source community. The above is just Possibility.

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