Earlier quoted context omitted.
A good way to understand how much we thanklessly rely on some professions, Google pictures of any garbage disposal strike
Garbage disposal and oss is an amusing comparison.
yes, one of them is paid.
Burnout is real for open source maintainers
51–60 of 75 posts
Re: Burnout is real for open source maintainers
#52[flagged]
Re: Burnout is real for open source maintainers
#53If you have a hobby project like writing a blog, crocheting, or almost any other creative hobby, you can dip in and out however it suits you. If you deal with major life events, sicknesses, etc., you can leave the hobby and come back. Nobody is paying you for it, so nobody can complain (maybe the friends who miss you, but it's not actively impacting the real world). Open source is one of those weird things where your…
When I was a kid, we always had New Year's (read: Christmas) decorations (the maximum that wouldn't be out of place in a mostly Muslim country) on a small park in my neighborhood. One year they never appeared, and people were enraged . The guy the city hired every year had a mob in front of his door. People's letters to the authorities got no answer, so suddenly he apparently became their contact person. I was buying…
Please can we have the other story?
Re: Burnout is real for open source maintainers
#54If you have a hobby project like writing a blog, crocheting, or almost any other creative hobby, you can dip in and out however it suits you. If you deal with major life events, sicknesses, etc., you can leave the hobby and come back. Nobody is paying you for it, so nobody can complain (maybe the friends who miss you, but it's not actively impacting the real world). Open source is one of those weird things where your…
When I was a kid, we always had New Year's (read: Christmas) decorations (the maximum that wouldn't be out of place in a mostly Muslim country) on a small park in my neighborhood. One year they never appeared, and people were enraged . The guy the city hired every year had a mob in front of his door. People's letters to the authorities got no answer, so suddenly he apparently became their contact person. I was buying…
To me it sounds like people assumed the guy skipped christmas decorations for fundamentalist religous reasons. And then projected all their fears and anger on him. Like, this was not reaction to missing decorations. It was fear of fundamentalism taking over and not wanting to cede your little turf.
And I think he was apologizing to placate angry crowd, not necessary because genuine guilt.
Re: Burnout is real for open source maintainers
#55I wrote recently about bringing back my open source project back from the dead. It's more than a decade old. Many life events occured during that time. It's tough. It's nothing like Lodash but honestly these things ebb and flow. It operates in cycles just as life does. Wish him all the best. Sounds like he had many tough years personally and I can relate. https://go-micro.dev/blog/27
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Re: Burnout is real for open source maintainers
#56If you have a hobby project like writing a blog, crocheting, or almost any other creative hobby, you can dip in and out however it suits you. If you deal with major life events, sicknesses, etc., you can leave the hobby and come back. Nobody is paying you for it, so nobody can complain (maybe the friends who miss you, but it's not actively impacting the real world). Open source is one of those weird things where your…
If everyone needs it, everyone can pay for it.
Don’t take shit just because you release software under a permissive license.
Re: Burnout is real for open source maintainers
#57I remember the creator of Lodash being quite abrasive in the early days, when the library was surfacing as an alternative fork of underscore.js. Life does you a number.
Re: Burnout is real for open source maintainers
#58Instead of going open source, consider selling licenses with Supported Source (https://supso.org/). I made this for the maintainer problem: it's easy to burnout when companies are constantly asking for new features or fixes, while not paying you anything. Why should you work for free so these companies can make more profits? When they start paying you, you're a lot happier about it.
Re: Burnout is real for open source maintainers
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds almost surreal. Pretty wild how my model of society doesn't account for this.
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 sof…
As a non Christian, I feel that Christianity and similar religions did much to counter such harmful innate human tendencies (promoting charity, forgiveness, humility, etc) and the reason why Western societies have been so successful. The trend toward secularism could also explain their recent decline.
Re: Burnout is real for open source maintainers
#60> When people talk about burnout in open source, the conversation often centers on workload, too many issues, too many requests, too much responsibility.
Why not simply ignore all this stuff by the maxim "my software - my vision":
- If some request does not serve your vision for the software: close it.
- If you cannot handle the workload: work less on the program.
- If issues exist which you cannot fix very fast: take your time to fix it. Nobody is willing to pay you big money for fixing the issue, so a fix does not seem to be very urgent for the users.
- Too much responsibility: if the software was indeed such an important piece of infrastructure, people would pay you big money for you to maintain it.