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Prior to sponsors, you developed that project for the fun of it. It was useful to some, so you gave this sponsorship thing a try. It was a success, maybe not
by bluefox 7y ago
Prior to sponsors, you developed that project for the fun of it. It was useful to some, so you gave this sponsorship thing a try. It was a success, maybe not a great success, but still. Now that you have sponsors, you feel somewhat obligated, but still not on the level of that "professional software industry" that destroyed so much about programming for you.
Time passes, and at some point it becomes clear that sponsors don't have infinite resources, and at some point some of them take their money and leave. It lingers in the back of your head, but you continue development. You notice however, that your motivation lessens, especially for that particular project people care about. You decide that you want to move on.
Many of the remaining sponsors don't take it well and back away. Now you feel that there's no point to even work on something else. Your soft income is nil. You remember the days you worked that software job. Back then, you managed to write a bit of code, push to a GitHub public repository, and be content that programming was not just a profession to you. Now, you don't even have that.
You look around. There are sponsored celebrities, political cases where sponsors withdrew en-masse because of some controversy, and the usual monetary disputes. Having GitHub sponsors has become yet another status signal for potential employers or clients, and it's another a standard goodie to have them, by contract, transfer a small sum that way every month. Sickened, you turn back to your own issues.
You decide not to let Microsoft poke bytes in your Incentive Unit that way. An optimist, you assure yourself that in a few months you'll repair yourself and be able to write some code again, this time Free Software, since you well know what Open Source means, what it always meant. The GitHub demon is no longer an option. No big deal, since it's also become more like a "social network for developers" with status lines and people using their legal names and professionalism all over it. GitLab still requires JavaScript to view source code, so that's DOA, what with you having your default browser running with JavaScript disabled (the Internet went to shit a long time ago).
So you consider setting up some private GitHub-like that's actually accessible on your own server, or maybe use that FSF hosting site. You learned your lesson, but the software world took yet another step towards the void.
- _bxg1 7y agoThis... seems pessimistic and overly dramatized.
- parksy 7y agoUnfortunately due to the death of net neutrality, you find wherever you host your repository, there's more latency and network dropouts, and if you want to share your code only users with "Full Access" tiers at their ISP can view it - all the poor people on the cheap "Basics" accounts are stuck with a generic set of "Inclusions" which don't include your personal hosting choices. Dejected, you try and start a grass roots movement to open up the internet again, but due to the illegality of encryption the algorithms know and detect the subtle shifts in your social graph and semantic changes in demeanour. Late one evening, you hear a knock on your door. No one is there when you answer it, but you look down to see a small paper envelope. A quaint anachronism. Inside are photos of your friends and family at home, at work, dropping their kids at school. You turn to the last photo and it's a frame from a webcam - your webcam. A small picture-in-picture overlay shows a particularly disturbing frame from an illegal porno. You don't recognise it, and you were always careful to cover up your camera for "personal" time, so you suspect a deep fake. Your phone vibrates. A notification from the bank: "Your account is overdrawn." Your life savings are gone. Your phone vibrates again. This time it's a message. "This is your only warning. If you continue to fight the system, it will destroy you." You swipe to see who sent the message, but suddenly the screen goes black and your phone refuses to reboot. The sun is coming up now. A flock of android sheep swoop through the air, bleating electronically. You drop the envelope and its contents in the nearest recycling bin, step to the edge of your cloud-home, and cast your body to the mercy of the under-dwellers far below.
- relaunched 7y agoI would need data to concede that javascript required makes gitlab DOA for devs. Or, that they wouldn't enable javascript to write code.