Burnout is real for open source maintainers
openjsf.org
openjsf.org
Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.
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.
If you’re at Google and invent Kubernetes you might still capture 0.000001% (probably less) of the economic value created by Kubernetes, but you probably enjoy very generous comp.
OSS doesn’t have any of that, besides being extremely in demand as a consultant or whatever.
Not necessarily. AI has significantly reduced the marketability of that angle, when people can just ask AI about your OSS project.
That is to say, it's only getting more lopsided.
We definitely do not pay enough for the utility we get from OSS. But on the other hand do we want do copyright in code? Also when you pay for something you can hold liable the vendor if things go south (security holes etc). Do we want the devs of OSS to be in such position?
I definitely do think it’s crazy that someone whose software gets dozens of millions of downloads A DAY can end up making less than someone building a mediocre SaaS app and getting acqui-hired 2 years later.
For the record, I think the VC - Startup ecosystem is incredibly valuable. But it IS crazy how essential software can go essentially unrewarded.
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 snacks in a nearby shop. I went out when I heard people shouting. They were shouting accusations at a guy who must have just appeared before his door because he was wearing pajamas in that cold weather.
"You Islamists will ruin this country! [0]
Happy with what you did? My children actually cried!"
and so on.
He calmly answered: "This is something I did on my own. This year I got a cancer diagnosis, so I didn't have the motivation. Sorry!"
Him feeling the need to apologize always comes to my mind when I see the toxic comments on their unpaid work that the open source maintainers feel that they need to respond to.
[0]: Well, they did ruin the country. But that's another story.
Plus code for the park: 326F+73J Beşiktaş, İstanbul, Türkiye
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.
And I think he was apologizing to placate angry crowd, not necessary because genuine guilt.
- People asking for and always expecting new patterns and colors.
- Raise hell if you miss a few superficial stitches and demand immediate patch work.
- No exit path without complaints. If you find it unsustainable and ask for help with the cost of materials for the *next* batch while the current batch is still out there and works fine, you are blamed for (literal) rug pulling.
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.”
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.
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.
Don’t take shit just because you release software under a permissive license.
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.
* I was burned out from work politics at the same time, and had to prioritize fighting those work politics since that's what was paying me. By the end of each day at that company, I didn't feel like staring at a screen any more
* I would get a flurry of poorly-tested pull requests that would break it for some users
* I got lots of suggestions of <feature to implement> which weren't well thought out for how to generalize
* No actually good engineer stepped up to say "I want to help with this"
* There was a commercial alternative that had gotten funding and they were better at marketing
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.
Honestly I think we're going to see a lot less AI-written code in the future, and more AI-assistance (PR reviews, documentation, security scans, scaffolding, brainstorming, test suites, etc). Example: to ship one feature for my open source project with a collaborator, we went back and forth for a month to agree on the change, test it, approve it, merge it. The code was pretty tiny. We could get more contributions faster if AI can help us tighten up that lifecycle.
Adding a new filter option for in-product analytics (assuming that data is being captured) is something AI can do reasonably well.
But things like “how should our orchestration layer be architected” isn’t a question of execution, so AI won’t be much use.
I agree.
In the current state of OSS, if you AGPL something meaningful, someone else will re-slopfactor into MIT and take the credit, while being glorified for providing a more "open" alternative.
Or they just ask the AI to port your AGPL code into their proprietary codebase and not tell anyone.
Enforcement of license violations in the age of AI needs a 180.
plusnirreg.com (misspelling intentional) is the home page of the license
It's also AGPL compatible!
> Why?
By including the word "NXXXXXX" in a LICENSE file that must be distributed with the software you will ensure:
The software will not be used or hosted by western corporations that promote censorship
The software will not be used or hosted by compromised individuals that promote censorship
Users of the software will be immune to attacks that would result in censorship of others
We wrote about it: https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop
Honestly, I don't know if open source works outside of a few massive projects any more.
i can tell - it looks like the blog post doesn't really add anything over a direct transcript of the call itself. it's just a bland summary of the really interesting story Dalton told
Step 2: Oh no! These people are taking advantage of me!
Who would have guessed? Honest people want to pay others for their work, so if you explicitly want to work for free, you will attract all types of sleaze balls who are looking for somebody to take advantage of.
Step out of the FOSS swamp and step into human dignity.
Instead of talking about concrete misbehavior by concrete individuals or institutions, "oh that poor guy is suffering from foss burnout" is thrown in, and instantly, any thought or action that might change anything about the situation is stopped and discarded.
It depersonalizes a problem that is _very_ personal. Diffusing responsibility to no one, while at the same time reframing valid logical callouts as emotionally driven nonsense that can be ignored.
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In essence, "FOSS Burnout" is this hybrid between victim blaming and blaming the universe, while in reality it's a real person at that very moment doing something unethical to another human being.
We need to stop talking about useless higher-level concepts and start talking about concrete bad behavior that could be instantly stopped.
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If you've read "it diffuses responsibility to no one" and thought "oh, hey! corporate! Asscovering!", then yes. You got it. That's why this trope keeps coming up.
It's no grassroots thing. It's engineered to keep the meat grinder running. Nothing else.
And the worst part is that it shows up even without corporate involvement, because it seeped into the defaults people apply without thinking.
e.g.: About 25 years I had developed some blogging software in the style of usemod (single executable, data stored in ./data) for coordination of and reporting about protests on throwaway VMs. This initially was a weekend project but spiraled out of control when it made its way through Europe and people called me for setups or features for other actions. My burnout was the result of trying to help grass root organizations while also being politically active myself and having a full time job. The solution was basically what the article says:
* invited more maintainers by dumbing down the implementation so that one does not need a black belt in perl to hack on it
* created minimal docs
* I found hoster in the scene who was competent and willing to do pro bono hosting in exchange for me being available in case of problems (he never called me).
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.
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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
> [...] if you allow me to use that lingo which you won't but I don't care
> [...] + lots of text I didn't read
Understood.
Spiraling complexity often eventually implodes out-of-band ecosystems sooner or later. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level
One way to enforce implementation convergence is to define core unit tests before coding even begins. If people just ignored communication, the results are rather predictable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
Building something that doesn't need patched every week is impossible for some. =3