Burnout is real for open source maintainers

I think not.

I believe that post is bullshit written _by_ the oppressor (if you allow me to use that lingo which you won't but I don't care). Hence this is on-topic.

But interesting, isn't it? The moment someone questions the root narrative, someone instantly tries to shut it down with "ackschually unrelated!!11 You're hijacking by not having the desired response" + lots of text I didn't read.

As I said. It seeped into the default thinking of people so that they will defend it even if it is actually against their own best interests.

___

That post is no heartwarming story of resilience or healing or whatever. It's just PR for Google, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Joyent, enabling them to continue to extract value out of volunteers.

Framing a structural problem as some sort of personal failing that can be solved by just doing even more of what the corps benefit from.

sigh

> Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.

This is why forks happen. It’s very common for a maintainer to decide they’re stepping away from a project or even that they’re not supporting use cases or bug fixes. Then someone starts a fork and, if they are supporting it better than the original maintainer, the traction moves to that project. This happens all the time.

> It's like if you loved crocheting, but somehow if you stopped crocheting everyone in your city would no longer have clothes and need to walk around naked.

I think this is the fallacy at the center of a lot of these debates. In this analogy, people wouldn’t actually around naked. They’d come up with a new solution. They’d switch to sewn or imported clothes. Maybe some other group steps in and learns how to crochet and takes over.

The messier situations occur when one person simultaneously wants to maintain a tight hold on a project and its community, but the maintainers or the community don’t want to endorse any fork attempts. I’ve written before on HN about how some past attempts to form projects have been met with undue hostility for trying to “steal” someone’s pet project. Even open source communities can be hostile to companies forking projects, like all of the complaints that come up about big tech companies profiting off of their own forks of open software (which removes the burden from upstream maintainers). Another examples is when BambuLabs forked PrusaSlicer and there were years of cheap shots at the company for it (though those went away as everyone remembered that Prusa forked another project to make PrusaSlicer).

I really think maintainers who don’t want to do things should come out and say they don’t want to do those things. Let the communities and companies adapt accordingly. The worst state is this in between that happens some times where the maintainers want to retain tight control over the project and community and they try to give an impression of being the everything-to-everyone maintainer when they secretly hate it. It would be so much better for everyone if maintainers would just come out and say things like “I’m tired of fixing security bugs so everyone be warned, as security issues come out I’ll fix them when I get around to it.”

The society is built on informal expectations like that. People assume that things will go on as before, and they will start relying on it. They assume that for every thing they rely on, there is a bureaucrat somewhere responsible for making it happen. But unless you are that bureaucrat yourself, you probably don't need to be aware of the specifics.

Many things in the society depend on volunteer work. Open source software is unusual due to the scale of it. In other parts of the society, when many people depend on the work of a few, some corporate or government bureaucrat will usually assume responsibility. But in open source software, the few are often still volunteers without any formal responsibilities.

> Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.

Which you should happily abandon if you get bored.

If people truly need something fixed, they can fix it themselves, or pay someone to get it fixed.