FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects

Actually it does have a parallel in most sciences and engineering, academic publishing

Do we? I do open source work and maintainership, and am happy that this is outside the control and influence of industry.

Must even this that "makes the Internet special" also bow to industry needs?

For example, I'm already a freelance developer with (my countries equivalent of) an LLC and I send invoices to my clients for my work. I'm also in the process of writing a few libraries in the mobile/desktop/web shared-code space that I want to release as open source. Should I just mention this on the projects Github and website properties? A simple "contact me for an invoice" link and process the invoices/payments manually? Is there a platform a la Github sponsors/Patreon that is compatible with this workflow?

> Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture

I don't agree with that take. There was not, to my knowledge, a "volunteerism" component of either early open source or early hacking culture (though my roots only go back to about the mid-80s). The "volunteer" part came later, as there was an explicit effort to emphasize open source as free as in free labor. What I used to see was openness in the sense of knowing what the code did and being able to make changes if you want. It was more of scratching your own itch and letting others play with the code if they wanted.

For the last decades it has been coopted by corporations and especially SaaS.

Now a lot of FOSS is either corporate-driven or... unpaid labor for SaaS companies.

I think the disconnect is for devs that don't want to do that. But those same devs probably don't want to incorporate and go through the hassle of running their own business either. For them, who really just want to hack around and make software, I don't know if there's any real path. The whole value proposition of full time employment for a company is that someone else takes care of all that nonsense and you get to just do the thing you're trained for. Trying to extract that narrow piece out onto its own doesn't work well, and I honestly don't know if your solution really solves for that.

Companies that heavily rely on one specific FOSS project and have well-defined requests naturally get more invested in them one way or another. But even for these, which tend to be bigger tech companies with more cash, "just pay the maintainer" is a tough sell when they can just either come up with their own project (even FOSS and recoup the "losses" in proprietary IP with hiring marketing) or fork it if PRs from employees are not well-received by the maintainer.

I don't quite get the moaning. If you are unhappy with FOSS, don't do it?

Nobody is entitled to a FOSS developers time. But on the other hand, FOSS developers are also not entitled to anything.

Privatised OSes or other platform software is an absurd and insane proposition

I depended on a FOSS project once that was mostly done by one maintainer, and would sometimes send feature or fix patches upstream. Once I sent an e-mail that I could give him hundreds of dollars for some bug bounties - his program would improve and he would make some money out of it. He said thanks but no, he made enough in his day job and only had limited time to maintain the program.

IMHO the person donating already got something in return which is the free software + the good feeling of having donated.

I don’t offer anything in return for a donation because I also don’t want those strings attached and I feel at that point it’s no longer a donation. If I offer something in return it turns into sponsoring or simply buying services/access.

I maintain an open source project which is used by a few hundred companies, and I also sell a couple commercial products which enhance the functionality. I don't accept donations since I much prefer to offer well-defined commercial products instead of ill-defined donation benefits.

Despite this, I've still had users who insist I should accept donations, often claiming that I would make some absurdly unrealistic amount of money if I did so. In one case the user kept arguing with me and demanding to know more reasoning as to why I didn't want to accept his donation. Of course these same users are absolutely not interested in the well-defined paid products and always offer weird mental gymnastics as to their thinking.

I just can't relate to or understand this behavior. Do these people burst into random businesses in real life and say "Hello, I love your store but don't want to buy any of your products! I demand to know why don't you have a GoFundMe?"

And I don't think the donations are subscription model really works for the reasons you enunciate meaning that everything is too unspecified, yet there are definite implicit expectations of some sort of transaction or exchange. The non-specified nature contributes a lot I think to inefficiency as well as to stress for both sides of that marketplace. It's only one of the factors that makes changes in open source currently not ideal.

With current models, even if you do specify it it acts maybe in a sort of way like a patreon model which doesn't really make sense in open source which has almost unlimited number of discrete continuously redefining tiny tasks.

The way I see payments working is more as a formalization of your choice to say yes or no to things so basically like okay here's sort of like my minimum fee or here's what I'm quoting to take a look at this. There's no guarantee that you know the entire issue that is unspecified and that could balloon into multiple future directions is going to be solved by this but here's the amount which I need right now to take a look at the next step.

Some people might view that as a way for them to make money or extract value or get reward for themselves out of their projects that is sort of tied realistically to the actual demand that people are prepared to put their money where their mouths are.

Whereas other people might see it simply as a way ensure they do not get overwhelmed by allowing the market to decide priorities, and provided down regulator or gatekeeper on the amount of incoming work. The filtration function happens before the requester even makes the request ideally because then once the expectation for the transaction occurring sometimes is established requesters may think more about steps they could take themselves other than operating in a more depending on demanding way. Possibly anyway.

For the creator, you can formalize your no by putting a price in front of it saying it'll cost you this much for me to take a look at it. But the thing is the person who made the request isn't the only person looking at that issue presumably and they don't have to be the one that pays that through.

Anyway I just just an experimental idea. The real interesting thing and where the meat is here is like how do you structure these sort of micro transactions, that sells problems on both sides of that marketplace. In other words you're allow developers to exercise more control over their incoming workflow which is a key driver of happiness you provide the opportunity for them to get rewarded for their open source efforts in a way that's actually tied to specific toss rather than a nebulous sort of funders model or sponsors model, and you provide a bit more like clarity and definition for requesters you know to think well is it really worth it to me to to make this request and how much am I prepared to kind of you know put up to have this creator I take a look at the next step for me.

I think there's multiple ways you could configure bringing the ordering and structuring function of transactions to the open source community. The above is just Possibility.

I'm not saying doing this would be trivial (and you'll definitely want to engage lawyers to help do it), but if you do take support contracts it will have to be well-specified in the terms of the contract.

So the answer to all those questions is that it'll be whatever you and the contracting party want them to be as part of negotiating the contract. The more they ask in terms of speed, guarantees, availability, they more you'll make them pay for the support. If there are things you don't want to do, make the price so high nobody will pay it (or if they do, then hire out the work since they paid you so much for it).

On the contrary, SaaS company are advantaged at exploiting FOSS and this is creating increasing inequality in access to software, hardware, knowledge/skill, markets and capital.

In short, FAANGs and SaaS take all.

There's a reason why progressive taxation and public funding has been invented: infrastructure that benefits everybody need to be paid according to income.

Not that I have any insights, but we should never forget, that we stand on the shoulders of Giants. And the giant is overall massively underpaid.

People should simply stick to the slightly older JS syntax while waiting for new versions of JS to reach mass adoption... Essentially all of the new features add very little value nowadays (mostly cosmetic value)... Surely you can wait 5 years or so... There hasn't been any significant 'must have' feature since async/await anyway. It's not worth adding 100+ Babel tooling dependencies and sub-dependencies to your project and adding a transpilation step just to reduce your project's code size by 2% (that's what cosmetic changes to ECMAScript are about really)... Just use the older feature; this is the most compatible approach.

> Where’s the problem?

People will just fork it (e. g. Retro -> Metro with all premium features)

...that this does not work for libraries, tools and kernels. Which, together, make the backbone of FLOSS.

The google magic words you want are "Biden", "Executive Order" and "Software Bill of Material" :)

Feel free to join one of the working group.

You can also look at what Tidelift does.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,...

FOSS programming tends to be largely recreational or a labor of love, and a lot of the discipline and organization required to make good software is not fun, and will be actively avoided in recreational projects, especially for people who do the "not fun" parts of projects in their day job.

A really successful project has to have someone (or several someones) at its head who can organize everyone and keep things moving in the right direction. Part of this is being willing and able to say "no" even if it means someone may walk away from the project.

If you want to produce really, really good open source software, provide a stipend for the programmers so they don't need to keep day jobs and pay market rate for a small number of managers with the skill to organize, the charisma to get agreement from the team, and the knowledge of when to tell people "no".

> Even more recently, researchers discovered two "critical" security flaws actively being exploited in Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser. Additionally, the open-source Linux operating system was just hit in "its most high-severity vulnerability in years."

OK, but these security flaws are ubiquitous in closed source software as well. The difference in FOSS is the source is there for people to look at and scan for security bugs if wanted, and is there for people to patch when needed as well.

Closed source has these problems as well, it is all just less public.

Don’t worry about the bus factor, other people know what I’m doing and I have a backup who can take over. Might delay the project a month or two, but the company can manage without me.

Yet there are tons of developers using Angular, React, and Typescript

Everyone's different. Some people paint as a hobby. Some people are full-time artists and want to be full-time artists so they get paid and make money doing what they want basically. Even full-time artists have got to deal with gallery owners, other artists in exhibitions, marketing publications, buyers, patrons and grant money.

Somehow the way that open source works where it's never just what you want because you got a whole lot of ideas, inspiration, requests from other people so I don't think the traditional models of patronage or sponsorship are going to work for all cases.

And some people like yourself they're not going to be relevant at all because you just like to work on what you want as a hobby and don't care if you get paid for it and that's perfectly fine but there's plenty of other people who will be choosing to be full-time professional creators and I think that's wonderful and I just don't think there's the right options for them to monetize that at this time.