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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

#181

Post by jjav »

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…

> is doing something for free a free pass for false promises (advertising)?

If you have a specific project in mind, have you read the license under which that project has been made available to you?

If it is under most of the common open source licenses, you will find that it already states very clearly what applicability and support you can expect (none).

You are free to pay for a support contract if you need anything beyond what the free license guarantees you.

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

#182

Post by jjav »

tarsinge wrote: post #136
simon1ltd wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> 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.

There is no binary distinction and it isn't about the amount of money per se.

What you're missing is that full extent of what you can expect is spelled out in the license.

Whether it's an open source license or a commercial one, a common one or a custom one. If you don't prefer the terms of the default license, attempt to negotiate a different one. You can always negotiate. If you expect more, expect to pay more.

There is no clause in any license (that I've ever seen) that says if this project is more popular or shows up more often in search results then the license grants the recipients more support. That's not how it works. Read the license, that's what you get, nothing more.

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

#183

Post by jjav »

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-…

This is really the only correct solution. Either pay the maintainers to do the work (preferable) or in-house the work (second choice).

Long ago at Sun the practice was that all code had to have an internal team maintaining it. If the code was brought in from outside that's fine, but some team internally still had to be where the buck stops for fixes. If all bugs can be fixed by bringing in updated version from open source, that's great. But if not, there's still a customer with a bug and it must be fixed by the internal team if that's what it takes.

Of course, this wasn't too popular with some management, since they wanted to bring in all the free code but offload all the work to unpaid volunteers, instead of budgeting for maintenance.

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

#184

Post by jjav »

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…

> None of this is well-specified.

I'm not saying doing this would be trivial (and you'll definitely want to engage lawyers to help do it), but if you do take support contracts it will have to be well-specified in the terms of the contract.

So the answer to all those questions is that it'll be whatever you and the contracting party want them to be as part of negotiating the contract. The more they ask in terms of speed, guarantees, availability, they more you'll make them pay for the support. If there are things you don't want to do, make the price so high nobody will pay it (or if they do, then hire out the work since they paid you so much for it).

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

#185

Post by misslibby »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #163
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.

So what of what I said is asinine? I only refer to the claims made by the article.

I'd say calling FOSS a sausage fest is asinine.

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

#186

Post by jjav »

pabs3 wrote: post #66
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…

I don't think funders should get any more say in or influence the direction of a project than anyone else. That should be up to the maintainer, of course taking advice from the users and contributors to the project. Funders are simply buying sustainability of the project, and that should be enough for them. This is how it works in projects like Inkscape, Krita or Debian.

I view it as two separate categories; donations & support contracts.

Donations are a thank-you payment for the code as it exists today. If someone finds it useful or includes it in their commercial product, give me a donation to reflect that thankfulness. It doesn't get you anything in the future, it is a payment for what exists today as-is today.

If someone wants a guarantee of future work, whether features, bugfixes or support, that requires a support contract with a much higher payment and more formal terms. In that case, they can influence the future direction but it'll cost orders of magnitude more.

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

#188

Post by manigandham »

jckahn wrote: post #73
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.

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…

There's no such thing as "production ready". Everyone's production scenario is completely different and you project is only offered as-is.

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

#189

Post by parasew »

Web3 is said to change this and incentivize development and maintenance of protocols and commons. There is a recent piece at decrypt suggesting that this creates another form of 'community'. Any opinions?

Are Web3 ‘Communities’ Vapid or Authentic? Can we even call this communities? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30741332

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

#190

Post by misslibby »

graderjs wrote: post #171
misslibby wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sa…

I think a solution would be to not make one's contact information public, or limit the channel that can be used to get in contact.
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