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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

#171

Post by graderjs »

misslibby wrote: post #127
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…

There are many commercial open source projects already, with developers who get paid. I don't quite get the moaning. If you are unhappy with FOSS, don't do it? Nobody is entitled to a FOSS developers time. But on the other hand, FOSS developers are also not entitled to anything.

If people were adept at consistently setting their boundaries, in the face of demands that can be overwhelming, indeed the problem would be trivial maybe. Just say no.

But just saying no for many people is still a non-trivial skill.

Also, just saying no in the face of consistent and repeated demands while mixing that with a desire that many creators have to be responsive to the people who use their software and to satisfy those people to some extent, compounds the difficulties creators face.

I definitely think it's an obvious opportunity to bring more order and structure to these currently ambiguously defined exchanges. I believe we can do better than stress and ambiguity on either side of that.

Sure, one solution is creators just saying, "I don't want to do this right now," so just shut it down, close it, block them whatever, heh. I actually think that that's not as much of a general purpose solution as it looks like at first because creators do actually want to help people with their stuff, and they also want to get rewarded for doing so (because you know they need to eat and everything), and doing so actually takes a lot of time, and they also want to control their taskflow to some extent.

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

#172

Post by graderjs »

jchw wrote: post #97

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…

> 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.

Everyone's different. Some people paint as a hobby. Some people are full-time artists and want to be full-time artists so they get paid and make money doing what they want basically. Even full-time artists have got to deal with gallery owners, other artists in exhibitions, marketing publications, buyers, patrons and grant money.

Somehow the way that open source works where it's never just what you want because you got a whole lot of ideas, inspiration, requests from other people so I don't think the traditional models of patronage or sponsorship are going to work for all cases.

And some people like yourself they're not going to be relevant at all because you just like to work on what you want as a hobby and don't care if you get paid for it and that's perfectly fine but there's plenty of other people who will be choosing to be full-time professional creators and I think that's wonderful and I just don't think there's the right options for them to monetize that at this time.

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

#173

Post by int_19h »

Tade0 wrote: post #11
PaywallBuster wrote: post #6

makes you wonder, babel say they can't live with 300k a year in funding but the 1000s of projects used by 1000s of devs to build 1000s of things barely get 10$ a month or even a year OSS donations should be more fairly distributed, not power law, rock star levels, where 1 project can get more funding than 99% of projects.

Babel is particularly shady, because before asking for this money they dropped making their own polyfills in favour of core-js, which turned out to be a bad move considering the main contributor of that library found himself doing time in a Russian penal colony.

Gotta say, the comments on this core-js issue are very illustrative of the article.

https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/548

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

#175

Post by zwaps »

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.

Lots of things run on Linux, which was Torvald's thesis project at a European university.

Which, by the way, took 8 years... typical length for European's who really don't feel like graduating (back in the day).

It's a bit out there, but I do believe there is some truth to op's points.

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

#176

Post by goodpoint »

cheschire wrote: post #15

Okay but how many FOSS projects decide to pivot like Ukuu did and just drop the F? If the free is killing you, stop being free. Leave your free repo as is, add a link to your purchase page for future versions. Where’s the problem? People seem hell bent on sticking to core principles until their dying breath, but that’s not healthy. Edit: and before people start laying into me about free as in speech/beer, this articl…

> Where’s the problem?

...that this does not work for libraries, tools and kernels. Which, together, make the backbone of FLOSS.

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

#177

Post by aw9f70gae »

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…

Perhaps we should consider how modern society can change to fit the open source model rather than the other way around

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

#178

Post by BeFlatXIII »

amelius wrote: post #30
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…

I'd like to see FOSS funded in the same way as science.

Via grant proposals that all include obligatory tenuous connections to the "big" issues of the day (anti-cancer research and green energy in case of the sciences)?

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

#179

Post by BeFlatXIII »

jdrc wrote: post #137

I wonder if this will be expanded to 'open' content as well, i.e. people sabotaging their previously free content in order to steer people to paid content

Do you think archival services will become even more popular a reaction to preserve the previously-free content?

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

#180

Post by wmf »

zwaps wrote: post #175
wmf wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Lots of things run on Linux, which was Torvald's thesis project at a European university. Which, by the way, took 8 years... typical length for European's who really don't feel like graduating (back in the day). It's a bit out there, but I do believe there is some truth to op's points.

Linux has been developed by paid professional developers for 20 years or more. I agree that the European university model is interesting for initial R&D, but things have to professionalize over time.
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