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Burnout is real for open source maintainers

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Re: Burnout is real for open source maintainers

#71

Post by pibaker »

nitwit005 wrote: post #50
FinnLobsien wrote: post #5

If 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…

> 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.

It is very hard to just quit any hobby cold turkey if you have built your entire identity, your friendships, your social standing and in the case of FOSS even your employability around it.

Maintainers are human. That means their welfare matters. But that also means when the thing hurting them is the thing they have grown so attached to, they can't just walk away from it like throwing away a piece of expired bread.

Re: Burnout is real for open source maintainers

#72

Post by pabs3 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #30
dovesky wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can, which is also why Open Source is effectively dead thanks to AI.

Open Source is a movement of people who want to voluntarily collaborate on and share software. As long as there are people who want to do that, it will continue. I don't see anyone suddenly stopping doing that just because AI exists. Lots of open source projects are banning AI contributions, yet they're chugging along just as before. Honestly I think we're going to see a lot less AI-written code in the future, and mo…

I've been a FOSS contributor since the early 2000s, I've stopped contributing and stopped maintaining projects completely in recent years, except for when I am paid, or where there is a problem that affects me directly that I can't workaround easily. I don't feel the FOSS community values that formed part of my identity are represented in the community much these days, and AI has made that situation worse.

Re: Burnout is real for open source maintainers

#74

Post by egeozcan »

e4325f wrote: post #53
egeozcan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It was a figure of speech, I'd recommend you to follow the news about Turkey.

Re: Burnout is real for open source maintainers

#75

Post by kakwa_ »

FinnLobsien wrote: post #5

If 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…

I feel this is way too fear mongering heavy against developing in Open Source.

I published nearly everything I code on my free time, that's ~100 git repositories. Out of these, ~15 are documented and made generic enough to be used by other people, and out of these ~5 actually have some users, 2 being packaged in mainstream Linux distributions and one even has a CVE.

In total, I have received one AI slop PR. one.

Your mileage may vary, and you may be blessed/cursed with the new redis or xz. But in all likelihood, things will stay more than manageable in terms of critical infrastructure piece.

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