Open Source Must Be Fun (Or It Will Die) | Hacker News Reader

Open Source Must Be Fun (Or It Will Die)

mikemcquaid.com

14 pointsmikemcquaid7 comments

This has been on my mind for a while. Most OSS is done by volunteers, most volunteers need to enjoy it or it's unsustainable. "Sustainability" cannot be purely or primarily focused on money.

Thoughts?

I'd broaden the question about sustainability. I haven't worked deeply on OSS, but have worked with a number of other volunteer organizations or efforts, some on my own and some with a community.

In all cases, there needs to be some payback to the folks putting in time. And it can't just be money, because volunteer organizations never have enough money to compensate appropriately. Otherwise they'd be businesses :) .

Other forms of compensation:

   * fun, as you outline
   * recognition from others
   * impact on the world
   * legacy/connecting to the past
   * satisfaction of helping others
   * increased leverage toward other goals
   * learning new skills
   * connection and community

I'm sure there are a dozen others. But recognizing and fostering these benefits is critical to OSS surviving.

See, I do think everything like "recognition/impact" needs to come back at least in part to "fun" or it's not sustainable.

It's nice to think about how your work affects others!

It's important, though, to "put on your own oxygen mask first" :)

Fun is, by far, the biggest reason I can identify why I work on some open source projects and not others these days! I think it was also true in the past, but to a lesser extent. Docker circa 2015 never felt like a job at all and the early Dockercons werre a thing of legendary entertainment!

A couple of things have possibly conspired to make more established projects less fun in the past few years:

- we're getting older; as maintainers age, I find it's just harder to make time to go to hackathons and socialise with the younger generation, much as I would love to. Too much real life stuff on. The pandemic also established a 'before/after' and conferences just haven't been the same level since for me. I'm not sure if I changed or the conferences did.

- obviously LLMs, since they add a layer of interferences between both the demands on my maintainer time (LLM generated PRs) but also how much I need to interact with other people to solve a problem. I made plenty of online friends over the past three decades figuring stuff out together over some obscure library, but group debugging seems less important now if you can chuck it at Fable.

How do you find 'your' OS community? I am new to the OS world, and reading GitHub projects gets overwhelming. Where and how do I even start?

Reading your post about the fun of building something together without the goal of only money, seems like the human connection we need in this world. But how do you find community you would enjoy?

Solve problems you personally care about: “scratch your own itch”.

Alternatively, to go people-first: attend meetups or conferences related to a project or technology you’re interested in.

I recently open-sourced my first macOS app, and this really resonated with me. Building and improving the product was fun, but signing, notarization, and CI took far more time than I expected.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com