Rust Ghost, Signing Off

I think this long predates github. Sure, it might be less of an issue if it's just a one off code drop - but there've been maintained open source projects LONG before github.

To me this is much more about reaching a (sub-) project size where there's no realistic way to keep up with everything you feel you ought to. The guilt of not getting around to review somebody's patch (even though that's how you got started), the guilt of not fixing a bug in code you last touched / wrote, not keeping up with subsystems you created, is profound.

I think this more likely an issue for people with personally traits that make them more likely to become maintainers.

I've seen this in companies too - the difference is that in open source it's often the "relaxation" time that's taken over by the guilt/work.

Edit: repair some autocorrect damage

I think the culprit is GitHub notifications. If you are not careful they will pull you in all sorts of directions.

There are some days where I set myself to a task. Open GitHub. Quickly check the notifications because the blue dot grabs my attention. Three hours later it's time to go to bed and I haven't done anything satisfying.

It's fine to fix other people's problem but it also prevents from building deeply meaningful things. Most of the interactions on GitHub are superficial issue discussions.

I think that the old guard of open-source greybeards were generally a lot less responsive to public feedback, and more apt to tell people that were being obnoxious to go pleasure themselves, rather than pivoting into PR mode and trying to placate.

My suspicions are compatible with yours. Last year I jotted down some thoughts about a possible solution:

> Zero-obligation communities could probably extract more value from their contributors (including converting passive bystanders into contributors) by fostering a culture of voluntoldism and getting maintainers to put in some asks of their own. Right now, people are half-insisting that there's something intrinsic to open source that is placing a high burden on maintainers. Mostly, I regard this as the result of bad practices originating from the culture of GitHub, not intrinsic to open source. But either way, it's widely reported that maintainers are burning out. Users are showing up and asking for too much. How about reversing polarity and start conditioning maintainers into asking for things from users and less involved contributors? The idea is for maintainers to give consideration to the most effective way a project would benefit if it had at its disposal a voluntary group of mechanical turks.

https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-jan...

There is also the expectation these days that when your project grows big enough, the unicorns are supposed to step in with funding. Considering MSFT is evaluating and using Rust now, paying a couple maintainers would hardly unreasonable for them, the community dropped the ball here. Mozilla and the Rust community need to step up their fund-raising game, losing product managers left and right is simply terrible for the ecosystem. Just a fortnight ago we lost the lead developer of one of the fastest web frameworks in existence over ideological conflicts. For good or for bad, libraries don't code themselves, every effort needs to be celebrated and applauded.

> I have a theory without data.

Me too :D

I've noticed signs of fanaticism within the Rust community. In response to many, if not most, articles about: new languages, new operating systems, or even old languages, or old software projects... I see folks commenting about Rust. Often times, it's pretty rude -- e.g. asking "Why isn't this done in Rust" in response to an operating system written in 2014. It smacks of zealotry.

And then we see people quitting due to burnout, and from abuse within the community. This makes a lot of sense if the community is, in fact, being driven by zealotry -- such communities tend to consume themselves.

> Is there a difference in burnout-rate between the new school of Open Sourcers and the old school of Free Software people?

From the old-school communities I've been part of, no. New-style communities are just more public. Old-school "stepping away from burn-out" posts went out over private mailing lists and IRC channels. These days, they go over blog posts and GitHub issues, so the public has a lot more visibility into them.

I second the camino de santiago, crazy good shape, electric paragliding, volunteer, donate blood, help homeless people in the streets, be gentle with people, use a sensory-deprivation tank, experiment with psychedelics; Becoming a farmer seems really interesting as well;

+1 for getting in shape. Starting to really work out has had multiple benefits (looks, health, mental resilience, it's therapeutic, ..)

You shouldn't wait for a burnout to do this though. (Although that's also when I started)

> Become a farmer.. I probably missed some ...

You will probably need first aid skills.

Doing a full time day job + leading a busy open source project team is a lot of work. It's like having 2 jobs. Then on top of that you have all the other things in life like family stuff (or dating), spending time with friends, taking care of your home.

Then, after all that you have relaxing. Not everything can be go go go.

No amount of energy ideas will help in this case.

> - Drive a supercar on the Autobahn

Please don't. Take it to the Nürburgring, but don't abuse the Autobahn as a race track. People die.

These all sound great for energy in the long term, but in order to find the time to do them alongside the full-time job you'd definitely need to drop the open source side projects.

And for many people, they're a big energy hit in the short term.

Not to mention the actix web founder.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your initiative, or that it wouldn't generally help, but I don't see where people's conduct or communication had a part to play in this particular story. Did I miss something?

It very easy to start, everyone should pay to the projects they depend on, just like other professionals pay for their tools, instead of feeling entitled to free beer.

I help with buying swag, books written by core team members, occasional donation.

Lack of financial support is not the whole story (there is a lot of blog posts declaring burnout written by very well-paid developers) but I agree that it is an important part.

The problem is that open-source software is a quintessential public good (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) ). Markets fail to properly incentivize creation of public goods and the free-rider problem arises. One approach to tackle this problem that is currently promoted by Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin is called quadratic funding (https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html). Basically the idea is that anyone can contribute a donation to some project and it will be matched using funds from a common pool in such amount as to ensure that the value you get from the project completion is commensurate to the donation amount. Probably not a silver bullet but the idea looks interesting and I like that they are experimenting on small but real-world problems (such as funding open-source projects for the Ethereum ecosystem) instead of just theorizing.