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The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

wired.com

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Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#41

Post by koolba »

Diesel555 wrote: post #35

I'm curious about when open source coders transition from enjoying sharing their product to feeling obligated to support their product to wanting some form of monetization when supporting their product becomes a job. Is it normally companies causing this or unrealistic expectations? I know myself, when I put something in open source I feel a responsibility to maintain it for no reasonable reason.

It usually happens after a series of poor life choices lead the developer down a path of financial destitution. They spend their personal time curating PRs to fix typos or expand their CI matrix to support N x M combinations of runtimes and cpu archs. Then one day they lose their day job, realize they have no savings, and that none of their FOSS contributions will help pay their rent.

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#42

Post by hinkley »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #8

I can’t read the article. I’m very interested, but Wired has become such a cesspool of popovers, pop ups, advertising, tracking, and general dark patterns that I just can’t go there... even with an ad blocker the experience is annoying and sucky. What happened to them?

I’m using reader mode more and more, but at some point I’ll be setting up a proxy server.

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#43

Post by _greim_ »

floren wrote: post #23
_greim_ wrote: post #10

It isn't so much that companies are unfairly using others' work. It's that if you're going to use an open source tool in your business's codebase, you'll inevitably need support, upgrades, and bug-fixes, which translates into you putting pressure on the maintainers to do more work. By all means, use those people's previous work to put something amazing out into the world quickly. However, when you inevitably need hel…

I go for #1 pretty frequently but my biggest frustration with trying to contribute to open source projects is: the repository whose owner pops in every 6 months or so to merge a PR or two, then disappears. Just enough activity to hope that they might eventually merge my outstanding PRs, not quite dead enough for me to just fork and move on with my life...

Merging a PR is work too, assuming the maintainer cares enough to review the code. Why not sponsor the project by placing a $300 bounty on the PR merge? As an OSS maintainer who's been on the other side of this in the past, that would have been quite a motivation for me.

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#44

Post by cageface »

andi999 wrote: post #34
cageface wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At every company I've worked I've lobbied for us to make donations to open source projects we depend on. Every single time it quietly dies in legal. There must be a better way.

I am not from legal, but too me there the problem would be: you use a product, but you dont 'buy' it, you 'donate' to the guy who made it, who is also 'super nice' and fixes some stuff about the product you need. This looks like a work/service/purchase agreement in disguise. Actually you dont want that to be possible.

From what I gathered the problem is often that most corporate legal departments are overworked so small donations to open source projects are just never high priority enough to displace other tasks they have in their queue.

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#45

Post by ehwhyreally »

shp0ngle wrote: post #40
floren wrote: post #26

> While you're surfing the web, you ought to thank Jacob Thornton for making it so pretty. He's a programmer who, along with web designer Mark Otto, created Bootstrap, free software that the pros use to make their sites look spiffy. If you've ever noticed that a lot of websites have the same big chunky buttons, or the same clean forms, that's likely because an estimated one-fifth of all websites on the planet use Boo…

I very much disagree. Bootstrap is good and makes making websites quickly easy. The ideas of Bootstrap now live in Tailwind and other CSS frameworks. I haven’t used Bootstrap proper when I switched to Tailwind in new projects though.

Bootstrap is nothing like tailwind. nor their ideals. You look at 2 websites made in tailwind and they look completely different. Look at bootstrap and its the same bloody site.

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#46

Post by pabs3 »

techwizrd wrote: post #4
pmoriarty wrote: post #2

How much better the world would be if open source was fully funded by some of those tech billionaires whose fortunes were made by sitting on its shoulders.

I agree. I would love to see more things like Summer of Code or grants towards open-source software. Is there a sustainable way to fund open-source work apart from corporate benefactors who "own" the software?

There are lots of internship, grants, bounty and patronage programs for open source, check out the FOSSjobs resources wiki page:

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/Resources

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#47

Post by gonational »

If you’re part of some group (e.g., OSS contributors), and a mass media propaganda company, like Wired, which is run by a Vanderbilt, comes along and starts saying things about “this poor lil feller is being abused”, etc., you should be extremely worried; they work for somebody who’s coming after you.

The first step in taking advantage of a group else is convincing that group that they’re victims.

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#48

Post by rectang »

I predict that the problem of overburdened open source maintainers will be solved by adjusting expectations, rather than new funding or new business models.

Open Source maintainers owe nothing to non-paying users. The norm should be that only those that pay get support.

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#49

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

hinkley wrote: post #42
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #8

I can’t read the article. I’m very interested, but Wired has become such a cesspool of popovers, pop ups, advertising, tracking, and general dark patterns that I just can’t go there... even with an ad blocker the experience is annoying and sucky. What happened to them?

I’m using reader mode more and more, but at some point I’ll be setting up a proxy server.

How will a proxy server block anything?

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#50

Post by pabs3 »

rectang wrote: post #48

I predict that the problem of overburdened open source maintainers will be solved by adjusting expectations, rather than new funding or new business models. Open Source maintainers owe nothing to non-paying users. The norm should be that only those that pay get support.

Requiring payment for support would mean that poor people who switch to open source are going to have a bad time. A better option would be to create a community of users and contributors that are willing to support each other and improve the project at the same time. The new GitHub discussions feature can help facilitate creating such a community for those projects that use GitHub.
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