33 ms·

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

165 points by parasew 5y ago

antattack 5y ago
Recent security incidents have shown how quick open-source is to address vulnerabilities compared to closed source. It has shown that FOSS does not come w/o a cost (open-source does not mean free) and it's advantageous and necessary for companies to support FOSS financially.
- Mc91 5y ago
  It has shown this. > 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.
ungamedplayer 5y ago
This has happened since the first foss project. Guess us foss programmers are a bunch of phonies
xwdv 5y ago
If you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen.
- throwaways85989 5y ago
  Eh, what, this is not a kitchen. This is a hobby project, a child-toy-kitchen, some people seem to mistaken a a career. Patch is welcome and if you want software work for free, fork it and do your own work on it.
  - ahartmetz 5y ago
    The kitchen is real because it produces real food that real people choose to eat. But it is indeed not much of a career, usually.
    - asah 5y ago
      Y, but open source contribution IS a decent addition to one's resume.
  - FiloSottile 5y ago
    Is that really the outcome we want? That large companies fork all the OSS they need and take control away from the maintainers? Because it's what is going to happen if we don't build an alternative where maintainers have a proper career path.
    - weego 5y ago
      They're in control of the license from the very start. Anyone who doesn't want that doesn't need to use a license that is so open. I like most others' careers has been deeply enriched by open source, but I find it hard to have sympathy for anyone releasing under a very open license and then pulling a pikachu face when their project is used within the boundaries of how it is offered. This same discussion has previously devolved to 'well projects with non-liberal licenses don't tend to get traction', the answer to which is there's a false assumption here that every oss project should trend towards adoption. That should never be the primary goal and is one of the main pillars of why the entire ecosystem is becoming dysfunctional.
    - singpolyma3 5y ago
      Yes. Every company who needs changes in a FOSS project should fork it. Freedom is the freedom to fork, it's the whole point.
    - hyperman1 5y ago
      As I understood, this is how apache httpd started. NCSA had publicly released httpd, and people wrote all kinds of patches for it. After a while, someone made the effort to combine and organize all these patches, creating what he called a patchy httpd, hence the name apache httpd.
- draw_down 5y ago
Lucasoato 5y ago
Non-paywall version: https://web.archive.org/web/20220320083930/https://www.businessinsider.com/open-source-developers-burnout-low-pay-internet-2022-3 https://web.archive.org/web/20220320083930/https://www.busin...
PaywallBuster 5y ago
makes you wonder, babel say they can't live with 300k a year in funding but the 1000s of projects used by 1000s of devs to build 1000s of things barely get 10$ a month or even a year OSS donations should be more fairly distributed, not power law, rock star levels, where 1 project can get more funding than 99% of projects.
- jdrc 5y ago
  But this will never happen
- oaiey 5y ago
  Babel is a massive project which at a point was key for any web project. And 300k is good for how many full time people. In the US maybe 3? 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.
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    Probably closer to 1.5 people in the US. Unless they have some means of getting health insurance for free and not paying taxes on their income.
    - micromacrofoot 5y ago
      and that’s borderline, a seasoned dev can find better offers at that rate… and with more benefits senior devs easily cost a company $200k between taxes, insurance, and benefits
      - kayodelycaon 5y ago
        Yup. I was assuming $200k total cost for a senior developer in the Midwest. If you want someone on the West coast, you’re easily looking at $300k for just the salary due to the cost of living being more than double.
  - 5y ago
jdrc 5y ago
Just put the project out there under the anonymous author natoshi sakamoto. If people want to be rewarded, we have invented a mechanism for that thousands of years ago, it's called the market.
chernobogdan 5y ago
The situation can be improved by actually contributing instead of asking for features.
- FiloSottile 5y ago
  No, it can't. More contributions require more maintainer effort, not less, if you want the project to follow a design and pursue a goal, rather than be a kitchen sink.
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  Yeah… no. I’m working on a pretty important project at my job that needs to be done well and as fast as possible without sacrificing quality. I’m writing code solo because I know exactly what I need to write and having to keep a second person in line would use so much time and energy, I wouldn’t get work done. 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.
cheschire 5y ago
Okay but how many FOSS projects decide to pivot like Ukuu did and just drop the F? If the free is killing you, stop being free. Leave your free repo as is, add a link to your purchase page for future versions. Where’s the problem? People seem hell bent on sticking to core principles until their dying breath, but that’s not healthy. Edit: and before people start laying into me about free as in speech/beer, this article is about the latter, not the former.
- schleck8 5y ago
  > Leave your free repo as is > Where’s the problem? People will just fork it (e. g. Retro -> Metro with all premium features)
  - cheschire 5y ago
    If you want your software to be FOSS, then you must accept than people can and will fork your work and make more money than you while doing it. If you don't want your software to be FOSS anymore, then you have to accept that at some point previously the "meat" of your code was already FOSS and you will be effectively competing against yourself. I still don't understand the problem, it's inherent in the decision to become FOSS in the first place. Or do you mean these folks who are complaining just didn't understand what FOSS meant before they got into it?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > Where’s the problem? ...that this does not work for libraries, tools and kernels. Which, together, make the backbone of FLOSS.
FiloSottile 5y ago
Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture and of what makes the Internet special: people choose to experiment and share their work, and their work can reach every corner of the world. It has no significant parallel in other industries, it's beautiful, and I owe it my career. However, it's not a sustainable, fair, or effective foundation for an industry with the responsibility to power modern society. We need the critical role of Open Source maintainer to professionalize. This is most likely to happen through capture by large intermediaries, but I wish to see it happen through the formation of a serious professional role, organized independently or in small firms, like lawyers. This will require changes both from the maintainers [1] (become legible, get a LLC, send real invoices, offer guarantees) and from companies [2] (pay the maintainers, pay them real money, pay for maintenance, and keep paying them). [1] https://words.filippo.io/professional-maintainers/ https://words.filippo.io/professional-maintainers/ [2] https://words.filippo.io/pay-maintainers/ https://words.filippo.io/pay-maintainers/
- jdrc 5y ago
  It was also a way to overcome national and economic barriers that would exist if they e.g. set a price for the software. Actually it does have a parallel in most sciences and engineering, academic publishing
  - FiloSottile 5y ago
    Academic publishing is a very interesting parallel to think about, indeed! In particular the fact that often when a publication turns out to have industry value, a company is formed around it to commercialize it: both to extract profit from it, and to make it accessible and legible by companies. Companies by and large don't take academic papers off arXiv and implement them. The rest are funded through grants, which have the side effect of directing a sizeable chunk of the academics time to writing grant applications rather than science. I think that would be a regrettable outcome for Open Source.
    - jltsiren 5y ago
      > The rest are funded through grants, which have the side effect of directing a sizeable chunk of the academics time to writing grant applications rather than science. That's not a consequence of grant funding itself. The traditional academic career path jumps directly from a trainee to a manager, and managers have to do what managers do. Larger research institutes have positions for professional researchers. Those researchers don't have to spend that much time on grant writing, unless they want to become managers or they are trying to remain competitive for positions in the traditional PI-centric academia. That's a key lesson for FOSS. If the development is funded by grants and donations, the organization should be large enough that every senior developer doesn't have to become a manager.
RedShift1 5y ago
Part of the problem is probably the high amount of churn. In the Javascript world this is absolutely ridiculous, people just can't seem to leave things alone and it causes a cascading effect, where one developer makes an API change and suddenly thousands of developers have to deal with a change that typically brings them no benefit. It's pretty much a self-inflicted wound.
- donatj 5y ago
  I don’t understand the sheer volume of major version increments in JS projects. Avoiding breaking changes should be one of your main goals as a developer, yet I swear some libraries have major version increments multiple times per month.
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    Modern JavaScript grew up in the culture of “move fast, break things”. Combined with JavaScript having a limited “vocabulary” and being the new PHP, you end up with a lot of churn as people start building large applications without the tooling for it.
andrew_ 5y ago
Clickbait summary article presenting isolated incidents as a forecast of doom.
natmaka 5y ago
There is at least a project aiming at specifying a protocol (and at developing associated tools) defining how developers can be paid, in order to let users support what they use (even through dependencies) according to their will and without too much of a burden. https://openfare.dev/ https://openfare.dev/
jameshush 5y ago
I like what the React Training guys did with react-router: use the organic traffic from their library fuel their training business. Treat the FOSS project as your lead funnel, then sell a service to those leads. Maybe the service is training, maybe it's hosting the project (e.g Wordpress), perhaps it’s just leveraging it to get a lucrative job offer. You need to sell a service though on top of the project itself.
- nisa 5y ago
  Please not. I understand that this kind of works and provides income for a lot of people but especially in the Wordpress world every plugin is just one huge piece of upsell ads with limited functionality. I don't blame the developers who do this but it's not a solution.
  - dageshi 5y ago
    I can't think of a better solution, can you? With a lot of WP plugins, the alternative to buying the plugin is writing it yourself.
  - hluska 5y ago
    I wonder if there are more tasteful ways to do it.
raverbashing 5y ago
Join (from the part of the developer) idealistic goals, rose tinted glasses, naiveté, with (from the part of the users/contributors) lack of respect, lack of project visibility, lack of tact in dealing with OSS maintainers, sometimes lack of technical prowess and too much initiative, and the environment is set for conflict. No wonder most people give up.
the_common_man 5y ago
What a clickbait. Media is so quick to exaggerate these days.
pabs3 5y ago
Do articles like these actually reach anyone who controls spending in companies with spare cash?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
FooBarWidget 5y ago
I'm an open source maintainer. I have a different take. Yes many projects lack funding, but I'm hesitant to ask for funding for my projects. Because: what sort of social contract would it imply if people fund me? Should funders be elegible for faster response times? Should their feature requests be implemented with more priority, or must they guaranteed to be implemented? What are the expectations of me? Can I take an extended holiday and go offline for a while? None of this is well-specified. One can argue that funds are donations and thus are free from attached strings, but psychology doesn't work that way. Funders will feel entitled to something, but what? You can see this pattern more obviously in Patreon: donors get something in return, such as faster access to content. So even though it's a "donation", people psychologically still experience it as a trade. With Phusion Passenger, I've commercialized a open source project. The contract is clear: if you pay then we both know exactly what to expect from each other. Formalizing the expectations to funders of my other open source projects, effectively turns those projects commercial. But to me, the appeal of my other projects is just that I can code on my own leisure, as a hobby, and give a gift to the community at the same time. It sucks that I have very little time for that because I work on those projects in my free time only, but I'm hesitant to turn those projects into "work" where I have to give guarantees in return for money.
- pabs3 5y ago
  I don't think funders should get any more say in or influence the direction of a project than anyone else. That should be up to the maintainer, of course taking advice from the users and contributors to the project. Funders are simply buying sustainability of the project, and that should be enough for them. This is how it works in projects like Inkscape, Krita or Debian.
  - D13Fd 5y ago
    Sounds like a great way to not have funders
    - gbear605 5y ago
      I know a lot of large Patreons exist without any benefits at all, or with the benefits being a 20 word update every month.
tuyiown 5y ago
Open source contribution has shifted from bare technological enthusiasm to career and marketing strategy. Users feels that, and started to show more and more entitlement which erodes contribution satisfaction. Open source only works if contribution is of selflessness sharing, as soon as it starts to be an investissement, users have the really legitimate feeling that a weird kind of reciprocity is in play, that tatters confidence and candor.
ptero 5y ago
One of the most important things a FOSS (and not only) engineer can do is learn to say no. And then decide if they do it for fun, or want money. There may be some overlaps, but it should be crystal clear which is the main one. This is 100% their choice. Trying to sit on two chairs usually ends in misery. And if they treat it as a hobby (fun) and a company, NASA or someone else needs a fix or a feature ASAP, well, they can always do it themselves. You do it if and when it works for you. The software will likely be better that way, too. My 2c.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
shultays 5y ago
Almost all devs that care too much about their work burns out eventually. It is just FOSS devs have higher percentage of "caring too much about their work" syndrome, to the point doing it for free. As someone that had similar issues, I would highly suggest everyone to view their job as job. You work on the time you were supposed to, do your best within your capabilities, raise issues when you see them but that is all. Don't overwork and try not to worry so much when things are not going the way you want them to be. You can still enjoy your work, just try not to have personal attachment to it. But I guess that is harder for FOSS devs, since the reason they work is being too attached to their projects.
clearcoat 5y ago
I don't think things are nearly as "broken" as these types of alarmist takes make it out to be. Quite the contrary I think FOSS is a model that other industries would do well to adopt. People talk about companies "free riding" on FOSS, but the corollary to that is that this allows an individual developer to be massively more productive, justifying the high salaries we see. To obtain value from just about any open source project, companies need to hire developers, individual developers are in a position to benefit as the gatekeepers to all this "free" value. Everyone is benefiting from this. Free is absolutely essential to making this work. Free is frictionless, free is equalizing. I'm not choosing between Redux over Mobx based on price, I'm choosing purely of intrinsic merits and community. It is always easy enough to find problems, but looking over the past couple of decades, I don't think you can argue but that things keep getting better.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > free is equalizing 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.
mynameishere 5y ago
And judging from some of these comments, those who haven't quit are sounding increasingly like abused wives making excuses.
jchw 5y ago
Personally, I don’t really sympathize with the “sabotage” stuff. To me, that’s just immature. Nobody can stop you from quitting out, archiving or deleting repos, etc. but choosing the route of trying to use your influence to try to cause harm is not helpful to anyone and only serves to mess up your reputation (and to a degree, the reputation of all of us maintaining open source projects.) I am yet again still annoyed by how the “problem” here is portrayed. Open source doesn’t need to be “sustainable” for anything in particular. I like open source because I can work on anything I want, and other interested parties can join. I also work for money, and in that case, I don’t get to work on whatever I want to. The problem of internet entitlement is also not unique to open source devs. I’m sure I am not the only one here who has ran internet communities of various sorts, and that, too, can be quite rough. Possibly even worse sometimes. I do sympathize with people who can’t mentally deal with the stress, because after all, people are only human and I think they have only good intentions at heart. But if you are feeling overwhelmed by your successful projects, I think it may be necessary to step back and make sure you’re still in it for the right reasons. Because big tech companies depend on open source, it is often seen as a problem that open source code is mostly unfunded… but frankly, that only matters if you care about the fate of the tech companies more than the open source communities. I say fuck it; Google can fork whatever project if it goes unmaintained. I wouldn’t really want my project to be controlled or influenced by Google, Facebook or Microsoft, but if they get no such influence, exactly what incentive do they have to support the original maintainers instead of forking it for themselves?
- rs999gti 5y ago
  > I wouldn’t really want my project to be controlled or influenced by Google, Facebook or Microsoft Yet there are tons of developers using Angular, React, and Typescript
  - jchw 5y ago
    I don’t consider this to be giving up control; I use open source projects from corporations by choice, mostly due to their merits. This is a mutual thing. On the other hand, having a big corp take over the direction of something I’m writing for fun to fit their needs is a totally different ball game. After all, many developers also use Windows or macOS, and that can have an impact, too. But for the most part, it’s inconsequential. The way I see it, open source is not different from freeware in this sort of way. If you release something out to the world under some set of terms, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people adhere to those terms. You also aren’t owed anything for being nice or giving people gifts. If you really care about getting a return on your investment, then I can only say that open source is a strategically shitty choice. Open source gives me the rare opportunity to work on stuff I actually care about, with other people who also happen to care about those things. Mutual benefit. For corporations that release software, it’s not really about autonomy, but it is still about mutual benefit; Facebook was even honest with this, mentioning that a reason for opening up React was to help make it more general and mature, and help flush out idiosyncrasies that plague the design.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
I think the "critical software industry" story is fascinating and if research does not already exist in these areas let's fund more of it: 1. Let's baseline the usage and spread first. What code is used, where and by whom. It ought to be possible to get complete pictures of this most large orgs scan their whole estate constantly - but publishing it academically? 1.a. A central "phone home" FOSS library that everyone "trusts" will just report the minimum might be a good idea here. 2. So if we know what codebase are critical we can then ask are they supported? Are the top five contributors paid in connection with the code base? Lots of ways of finding this about but email or bug requests is most likely winners. 3. A move I think is a good idea is to have some form of "Foss Tech Support Mesh" Library X is really useful, so several ISVs announce they support it, understand it etc. Maybe if an ISV account gets a commit accepted they get a badge. This will start to bridge the gap between volunteers and paid positions. while we are at it, what is the proprietary story? I am pretty sure Facebook has funds to keep its codebase updated, but there were MRI Scanner companies that cannot afford to move off windows XP, so there is bound to be a grey area of for profit companies producing code at not much more than subsistence level.
- moltke 5y ago
  Phoning home at all is absolutely unacceptable.
- di4na 5y ago
  You are 1 year late. 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.
- theobeers 5y ago
  Phoning home doesn't sound right, but maybe a bunch of FOSS developers can get together at some point and form something analogous to ASCAP.[0] i.e., monitor the public and commercial use of members' FOSS projects; shake down the users for financial contributions; and redistribute any proceeds to members as royalties. (I wouldn't be surprised if this has been tried already and failed. Nothing seems to make a difference.) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,_Authors_and_Publishers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,...
fartcannon 5y ago
The article sums up to 'programming is hard', support FOSS devs. Which is hard to find a fault with. The tone is a bit chicken little given that everyone experiences burnout if they have complex jobs that people depend on. In the end, devs probably need to stop being so easy going. Everyone probably needs to be a little more Linus.
- Accujack 5y ago
  This is the most difficult part of FOSS projects, and why relatively few of them match commercial products in quality or usability. 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".
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    I disagree with these broad strokes you're stating as universal facts, but I do agree that everyone should have access to some kind of UBI/stipend. That'd be awesome.
thosakwe 5y ago
I maintained a project like this for several years. My genuine advice to anyone considering creating an open-source library: either keep it super small forever, or make it closed-source + charge for licenses.
rurban 5y ago
they are talking about npm maintainers only. those yippies really have a hard time because nobody needs that crap, and if so for max 5 years.
ricardo81 5y ago
I've been meaning to donate more to open source and free services (e.g. archive.org). My last contribution was $20 to libcurl. Apparently it's used on billions of devices, if only each of those device owners donated $1!
leroman 5y ago
OSS developers perceived some value to be gained by them, at some point they seem to be disillusioned by the outcome or don't want to pay the cost of further investment beyond what they put (and got back) thus far. This just seems natural and could be followed by one of either 1. productise OSS project and start making money from it 2. allow other top maintainer to take the lead 3. work at some BigCo where they can afford to pay full time working on this OSS project, if that makes sense
deleted 5y ago
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jimjames88 5y ago
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adriangrigore 5y ago
I believe this article actually depicts the insanity of how some people "work" and getting paid for that. > many are quick to press him on what's taking so long. > people are shouting at you that you need to work on something This is not normal even in a workplace! Article not necessarily about open source but workplaces in general (not even IT only) only difference is that people in workplaces are getting paid to work in those horrible conditions. Disclaimer: I'm unemployed, released some open source stuff https://mkws.sh/ https://mkws.sh/, https://adi.onl/projects.html https://adi.onl/projects.html and surviving as I can rather then being pressed or shouted at I need to work. I value my mental health, thanks!
jdrc 5y ago
I wonder if this will be expanded to 'open' content as well, i.e. people sabotaging their previously free content in order to steer people to paid content
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  Do you think archival services will become even more popular a reaction to preserve the previously-free content?
misslibby 5y ago
OMG - another one for the annals of ridiculous feminist claims: "The free nature of open source also leads to inequity. Open source is dominated by men, and people who don't have as much leisure time or stability might be less likely to contribute to open source when there's no compensation involved." So an article lamenting the horrible lives of FOSS open source developers who work for almost nothing then turns around and blames the same OS developers for driving women out of tech by working for free. Never mind that women tend to be paid by their husbands, so they would have lots of spare time for FOSS development.
- DiabloD3 5y ago
  Both what you quote and what you said are both asinine: I've met a lot of female FOSS developers, several of them have worked their ways into management positions at major companies. The era of pretending FOSS is a sausage party is over, and the use of this as a talking point needs to end.
  - misslibby 5y ago
    So what of what I said is asinine? I only refer to the claims made by the article. I'd say calling FOSS a sausage fest is asinine.
gre 5y ago
$1 to read the article that says open source developers are putting the entire internet at risk. hmm
hogrider 5y ago
You want to sell software, just sell it, geez.
rs999gti 5y ago
> it's putting the entire internet at risk Mike Monteiro: F*ck You, Pay Me - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U
jgerrish 5y ago
I understand my view is different, but I want to build what half of these people built. Traps, noise, abusive environments. Then the clock. I'll keep saying it unfortunately :(.
panny 5y ago
Another project recently sabotaged intentionally is node-ipc. I'm surprised the article didn't mention it. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/03/sabotage-code-added-to-popular-npm-package-wiped-files-in-russia-and-belarus/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/03/sabot...
jnash 5y ago
If you give away your work for free and then complain and act all surprised/hurt when nobody pays you in return then you are the problem. Not the people using your work. Accept it and move on. Or make people pay for your work. It's that simple.
parasew 5y ago
Web3 is said to change this and incentivize development and maintenance of protocols and commons. There is a recent piece at decrypt suggesting that this creates another form of 'community'. Any opinions? Are Web3 ‘Communities’ Vapid or Authentic? Can we even call this communities? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30741332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30741332

165 points by parasew 5y ago

Recent security incidents have shown how quick open-source is to address vulnerabilities compared to closed source. It has shown that FOSS does not come w/o a cost (open-source does not mean free) and it's advantageous and necessary for companies to support FOSS financially.

Mc91 5y ago
It has shown this. > 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.

ungamedplayer 5y ago

This has happened since the first foss project. Guess us foss programmers are a bunch of phonies

xwdv 5y ago

If you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen.

throwaways85989 5y ago
Eh, what, this is not a kitchen. This is a hobby project, a child-toy-kitchen, some people seem to mistaken a a career. Patch is welcome and if you want software work for free, fork it and do your own work on it.
- ahartmetz 5y ago
  The kitchen is real because it produces real food that real people choose to eat. But it is indeed not much of a career, usually.
  - asah 5y ago
    Y, but open source contribution IS a decent addition to one's resume.
- FiloSottile 5y ago
  Is that really the outcome we want? That large companies fork all the OSS they need and take control away from the maintainers? Because it's what is going to happen if we don't build an alternative where maintainers have a proper career path.
  - weego 5y ago
    They're in control of the license from the very start. Anyone who doesn't want that doesn't need to use a license that is so open. I like most others' careers has been deeply enriched by open source, but I find it hard to have sympathy for anyone releasing under a very open license and then pulling a pikachu face when their project is used within the boundaries of how it is offered. This same discussion has previously devolved to 'well projects with non-liberal licenses don't tend to get traction', the answer to which is there's a false assumption here that every oss project should trend towards adoption. That should never be the primary goal and is one of the main pillars of why the entire ecosystem is becoming dysfunctional.
  - singpolyma3 5y ago
    Yes. Every company who needs changes in a FOSS project should fork it. Freedom is the freedom to fork, it's the whole point.
  - hyperman1 5y ago
    As I understood, this is how apache httpd started. NCSA had publicly released httpd, and people wrote all kinds of patches for it. After a while, someone made the effort to combine and organize all these patches, creating what he called a patchy httpd, hence the name apache httpd.
draw_down 5y ago

Lucasoato 5y ago

Non-paywall version: https://web.archive.org/web/20220320083930/https://www.businessinsider.com/open-source-developers-burnout-low-pay-internet-2022-3 https://web.archive.org/web/20220320083930/https://www.busin...

PaywallBuster 5y ago

makes you wonder, babel say they can't live with 300k a year in funding but the 1000s of projects used by 1000s of devs to build 1000s of things barely get 10$ a month or even a year OSS donations should be more fairly distributed, not power law, rock star levels, where 1 project can get more funding than 99% of projects.

jdrc 5y ago
But this will never happen
oaiey 5y ago
Babel is a massive project which at a point was key for any web project. And 300k is good for how many full time people. In the US maybe 3? 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.
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  Probably closer to 1.5 people in the US. Unless they have some means of getting health insurance for free and not paying taxes on their income.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    and that’s borderline, a seasoned dev can find better offers at that rate… and with more benefits senior devs easily cost a company $200k between taxes, insurance, and benefits
    - kayodelycaon 5y ago
      Yup. I was assuming $200k total cost for a senior developer in the Midwest. If you want someone on the West coast, you’re easily looking at $300k for just the salary due to the cost of living being more than double.
- 5y ago

jdrc 5y ago

Just put the project out there under the anonymous author natoshi sakamoto. If people want to be rewarded, we have invented a mechanism for that thousands of years ago, it's called the market.

chernobogdan 5y ago

The situation can be improved by actually contributing instead of asking for features.

FiloSottile 5y ago
No, it can't. More contributions require more maintainer effort, not less, if you want the project to follow a design and pursue a goal, rather than be a kitchen sink.
kayodelycaon 5y ago
Yeah… no. I’m working on a pretty important project at my job that needs to be done well and as fast as possible without sacrificing quality. I’m writing code solo because I know exactly what I need to write and having to keep a second person in line would use so much time and energy, I wouldn’t get work done. 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.

cheschire 5y ago

Okay but how many FOSS projects decide to pivot like Ukuu did and just drop the F? If the free is killing you, stop being free. Leave your free repo as is, add a link to your purchase page for future versions. Where’s the problem? People seem hell bent on sticking to core principles until their dying breath, but that’s not healthy. Edit: and before people start laying into me about free as in speech/beer, this article is about the latter, not the former.

schleck8 5y ago
> Leave your free repo as is > Where’s the problem? People will just fork it (e. g. Retro -> Metro with all premium features)
- cheschire 5y ago
  If you want your software to be FOSS, then you must accept than people can and will fork your work and make more money than you while doing it. If you don't want your software to be FOSS anymore, then you have to accept that at some point previously the "meat" of your code was already FOSS and you will be effectively competing against yourself. I still don't understand the problem, it's inherent in the decision to become FOSS in the first place. Or do you mean these folks who are complaining just didn't understand what FOSS meant before they got into it?
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goodpoint 5y ago
> Where’s the problem? ...that this does not work for libraries, tools and kernels. Which, together, make the backbone of FLOSS.

FiloSottile 5y ago

Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture and of what makes the Internet special: people choose to experiment and share their work, and their work can reach every corner of the world. It has no significant parallel in other industries, it's beautiful, and I owe it my career. However, it's not a sustainable, fair, or effective foundation for an industry with the responsibility to power modern society. We need the critical role of Open Source maintainer to professionalize. This is most likely to happen through capture by large intermediaries, but I wish to see it happen through the formation of a serious professional role, organized independently or in small firms, like lawyers. This will require changes both from the maintainers [1] (become legible, get a LLC, send real invoices, offer guarantees) and from companies [2] (pay the maintainers, pay them real money, pay for maintenance, and keep paying them). [1] https://words.filippo.io/professional-maintainers/ https://words.filippo.io/professional-maintainers/ [2] https://words.filippo.io/pay-maintainers/ https://words.filippo.io/pay-maintainers/

jdrc 5y ago
It was also a way to overcome national and economic barriers that would exist if they e.g. set a price for the software. Actually it does have a parallel in most sciences and engineering, academic publishing
- FiloSottile 5y ago
  Academic publishing is a very interesting parallel to think about, indeed! In particular the fact that often when a publication turns out to have industry value, a company is formed around it to commercialize it: both to extract profit from it, and to make it accessible and legible by companies. Companies by and large don't take academic papers off arXiv and implement them. The rest are funded through grants, which have the side effect of directing a sizeable chunk of the academics time to writing grant applications rather than science. I think that would be a regrettable outcome for Open Source.
  - jltsiren 5y ago
    > The rest are funded through grants, which have the side effect of directing a sizeable chunk of the academics time to writing grant applications rather than science. That's not a consequence of grant funding itself. The traditional academic career path jumps directly from a trainee to a manager, and managers have to do what managers do. Larger research institutes have positions for professional researchers. Those researchers don't have to spend that much time on grant writing, unless they want to become managers or they are trying to remain competitive for positions in the traditional PI-centric academia. That's a key lesson for FOSS. If the development is funded by grants and donations, the organization should be large enough that every senior developer doesn't have to become a manager.

RedShift1 5y ago

Part of the problem is probably the high amount of churn. In the Javascript world this is absolutely ridiculous, people just can't seem to leave things alone and it causes a cascading effect, where one developer makes an API change and suddenly thousands of developers have to deal with a change that typically brings them no benefit. It's pretty much a self-inflicted wound.

donatj 5y ago
I don’t understand the sheer volume of major version increments in JS projects. Avoiding breaking changes should be one of your main goals as a developer, yet I swear some libraries have major version increments multiple times per month.
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  Modern JavaScript grew up in the culture of “move fast, break things”. Combined with JavaScript having a limited “vocabulary” and being the new PHP, you end up with a lot of churn as people start building large applications without the tooling for it.

andrew_ 5y ago

Clickbait summary article presenting isolated incidents as a forecast of doom.

natmaka 5y ago

There is at least a project aiming at specifying a protocol (and at developing associated tools) defining how developers can be paid, in order to let users support what they use (even through dependencies) according to their will and without too much of a burden. https://openfare.dev/ https://openfare.dev/

jameshush 5y ago

I like what the React Training guys did with react-router: use the organic traffic from their library fuel their training business. Treat the FOSS project as your lead funnel, then sell a service to those leads. Maybe the service is training, maybe it's hosting the project (e.g Wordpress), perhaps it’s just leveraging it to get a lucrative job offer. You need to sell a service though on top of the project itself.

nisa 5y ago
Please not. I understand that this kind of works and provides income for a lot of people but especially in the Wordpress world every plugin is just one huge piece of upsell ads with limited functionality. I don't blame the developers who do this but it's not a solution.
- dageshi 5y ago
  I can't think of a better solution, can you? With a lot of WP plugins, the alternative to buying the plugin is writing it yourself.
- hluska 5y ago
  I wonder if there are more tasteful ways to do it.

raverbashing 5y ago

Join (from the part of the developer) idealistic goals, rose tinted glasses, naiveté, with (from the part of the users/contributors) lack of respect, lack of project visibility, lack of tact in dealing with OSS maintainers, sometimes lack of technical prowess and too much initiative, and the environment is set for conflict. No wonder most people give up.

the_common_man 5y ago

What a clickbait. Media is so quick to exaggerate these days.

pabs3 5y ago

Do articles like these actually reach anyone who controls spending in companies with spare cash?

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FooBarWidget 5y ago

I'm an open source maintainer. I have a different take. Yes many projects lack funding, but I'm hesitant to ask for funding for my projects. Because: what sort of social contract would it imply if people fund me? Should funders be elegible for faster response times? Should their feature requests be implemented with more priority, or must they guaranteed to be implemented? What are the expectations of me? Can I take an extended holiday and go offline for a while? None of this is well-specified. One can argue that funds are donations and thus are free from attached strings, but psychology doesn't work that way. Funders will feel entitled to something, but what? You can see this pattern more obviously in Patreon: donors get something in return, such as faster access to content. So even though it's a "donation", people psychologically still experience it as a trade. With Phusion Passenger, I've commercialized a open source project. The contract is clear: if you pay then we both know exactly what to expect from each other. Formalizing the expectations to funders of my other open source projects, effectively turns those projects commercial. But to me, the appeal of my other projects is just that I can code on my own leisure, as a hobby, and give a gift to the community at the same time. It sucks that I have very little time for that because I work on those projects in my free time only, but I'm hesitant to turn those projects into "work" where I have to give guarantees in return for money.

pabs3 5y ago
I don't think funders should get any more say in or influence the direction of a project than anyone else. That should be up to the maintainer, of course taking advice from the users and contributors to the project. Funders are simply buying sustainability of the project, and that should be enough for them. This is how it works in projects like Inkscape, Krita or Debian.
- D13Fd 5y ago
  Sounds like a great way to not have funders
  - gbear605 5y ago
    I know a lot of large Patreons exist without any benefits at all, or with the benefits being a 20 word update every month.

tuyiown 5y ago

Open source contribution has shifted from bare technological enthusiasm to career and marketing strategy. Users feels that, and started to show more and more entitlement which erodes contribution satisfaction. Open source only works if contribution is of selflessness sharing, as soon as it starts to be an investissement, users have the really legitimate feeling that a weird kind of reciprocity is in play, that tatters confidence and candor.

ptero 5y ago

One of the most important things a FOSS (and not only) engineer can do is learn to say no. And then decide if they do it for fun, or want money. There may be some overlaps, but it should be crystal clear which is the main one. This is 100% their choice. Trying to sit on two chairs usually ends in misery. And if they treat it as a hobby (fun) and a company, NASA or someone else needs a fix or a feature ASAP, well, they can always do it themselves. You do it if and when it works for you. The software will likely be better that way, too. My 2c.

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shultays 5y ago

Almost all devs that care too much about their work burns out eventually. It is just FOSS devs have higher percentage of "caring too much about their work" syndrome, to the point doing it for free. As someone that had similar issues, I would highly suggest everyone to view their job as job. You work on the time you were supposed to, do your best within your capabilities, raise issues when you see them but that is all. Don't overwork and try not to worry so much when things are not going the way you want them to be. You can still enjoy your work, just try not to have personal attachment to it. But I guess that is harder for FOSS devs, since the reason they work is being too attached to their projects.

clearcoat 5y ago

I don't think things are nearly as "broken" as these types of alarmist takes make it out to be. Quite the contrary I think FOSS is a model that other industries would do well to adopt. People talk about companies "free riding" on FOSS, but the corollary to that is that this allows an individual developer to be massively more productive, justifying the high salaries we see. To obtain value from just about any open source project, companies need to hire developers, individual developers are in a position to benefit as the gatekeepers to all this "free" value. Everyone is benefiting from this. Free is absolutely essential to making this work. Free is frictionless, free is equalizing. I'm not choosing between Redux over Mobx based on price, I'm choosing purely of intrinsic merits and community. It is always easy enough to find problems, but looking over the past couple of decades, I don't think you can argue but that things keep getting better.

goodpoint 5y ago
> free is equalizing 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.

mynameishere 5y ago

And judging from some of these comments, those who haven't quit are sounding increasingly like abused wives making excuses.

jchw 5y ago

Personally, I don’t really sympathize with the “sabotage” stuff. To me, that’s just immature. Nobody can stop you from quitting out, archiving or deleting repos, etc. but choosing the route of trying to use your influence to try to cause harm is not helpful to anyone and only serves to mess up your reputation (and to a degree, the reputation of all of us maintaining open source projects.) I am yet again still annoyed by how the “problem” here is portrayed. Open source doesn’t need to be “sustainable” for anything in particular. I like open source because I can work on anything I want, and other interested parties can join. I also work for money, and in that case, I don’t get to work on whatever I want to. The problem of internet entitlement is also not unique to open source devs. I’m sure I am not the only one here who has ran internet communities of various sorts, and that, too, can be quite rough. Possibly even worse sometimes. I do sympathize with people who can’t mentally deal with the stress, because after all, people are only human and I think they have only good intentions at heart. But if you are feeling overwhelmed by your successful projects, I think it may be necessary to step back and make sure you’re still in it for the right reasons. Because big tech companies depend on open source, it is often seen as a problem that open source code is mostly unfunded… but frankly, that only matters if you care about the fate of the tech companies more than the open source communities. I say fuck it; Google can fork whatever project if it goes unmaintained. I wouldn’t really want my project to be controlled or influenced by Google, Facebook or Microsoft, but if they get no such influence, exactly what incentive do they have to support the original maintainers instead of forking it for themselves?

rs999gti 5y ago
> I wouldn’t really want my project to be controlled or influenced by Google, Facebook or Microsoft Yet there are tons of developers using Angular, React, and Typescript
- jchw 5y ago
  I don’t consider this to be giving up control; I use open source projects from corporations by choice, mostly due to their merits. This is a mutual thing. On the other hand, having a big corp take over the direction of something I’m writing for fun to fit their needs is a totally different ball game. After all, many developers also use Windows or macOS, and that can have an impact, too. But for the most part, it’s inconsequential. The way I see it, open source is not different from freeware in this sort of way. If you release something out to the world under some set of terms, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people adhere to those terms. You also aren’t owed anything for being nice or giving people gifts. If you really care about getting a return on your investment, then I can only say that open source is a strategically shitty choice. Open source gives me the rare opportunity to work on stuff I actually care about, with other people who also happen to care about those things. Mutual benefit. For corporations that release software, it’s not really about autonomy, but it is still about mutual benefit; Facebook was even honest with this, mentioning that a reason for opening up React was to help make it more general and mature, and help flush out idiosyncrasies that plague the design.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

I think the "critical software industry" story is fascinating and if research does not already exist in these areas let's fund more of it: 1. Let's baseline the usage and spread first. What code is used, where and by whom. It ought to be possible to get complete pictures of this most large orgs scan their whole estate constantly - but publishing it academically? 1.a. A central "phone home" FOSS library that everyone "trusts" will just report the minimum might be a good idea here. 2. So if we know what codebase are critical we can then ask are they supported? Are the top five contributors paid in connection with the code base? Lots of ways of finding this about but email or bug requests is most likely winners. 3. A move I think is a good idea is to have some form of "Foss Tech Support Mesh" Library X is really useful, so several ISVs announce they support it, understand it etc. Maybe if an ISV account gets a commit accepted they get a badge. This will start to bridge the gap between volunteers and paid positions. while we are at it, what is the proprietary story? I am pretty sure Facebook has funds to keep its codebase updated, but there were MRI Scanner companies that cannot afford to move off windows XP, so there is bound to be a grey area of for profit companies producing code at not much more than subsistence level.

moltke 5y ago
Phoning home at all is absolutely unacceptable.
di4na 5y ago
You are 1 year late. 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.
theobeers 5y ago
Phoning home doesn't sound right, but maybe a bunch of FOSS developers can get together at some point and form something analogous to ASCAP.[0] i.e., monitor the public and commercial use of members' FOSS projects; shake down the users for financial contributions; and redistribute any proceeds to members as royalties. (I wouldn't be surprised if this has been tried already and failed. Nothing seems to make a difference.) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,_Authors_and_Publishers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,...

fartcannon 5y ago

The article sums up to 'programming is hard', support FOSS devs. Which is hard to find a fault with. The tone is a bit chicken little given that everyone experiences burnout if they have complex jobs that people depend on. In the end, devs probably need to stop being so easy going. Everyone probably needs to be a little more Linus.

Accujack 5y ago
This is the most difficult part of FOSS projects, and why relatively few of them match commercial products in quality or usability. 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".
- fartcannon 5y ago
  I disagree with these broad strokes you're stating as universal facts, but I do agree that everyone should have access to some kind of UBI/stipend. That'd be awesome.

thosakwe 5y ago

I maintained a project like this for several years. My genuine advice to anyone considering creating an open-source library: either keep it super small forever, or make it closed-source + charge for licenses.

rurban 5y ago

they are talking about npm maintainers only. those yippies really have a hard time because nobody needs that crap, and if so for max 5 years.

ricardo81 5y ago

I've been meaning to donate more to open source and free services (e.g. archive.org). My last contribution was $20 to libcurl. Apparently it's used on billions of devices, if only each of those device owners donated $1!

leroman 5y ago

OSS developers perceived some value to be gained by them, at some point they seem to be disillusioned by the outcome or don't want to pay the cost of further investment beyond what they put (and got back) thus far. This just seems natural and could be followed by one of either 1. productise OSS project and start making money from it 2. allow other top maintainer to take the lead 3. work at some BigCo where they can afford to pay full time working on this OSS project, if that makes sense

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jimjames88 5y ago

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adriangrigore 5y ago

I believe this article actually depicts the insanity of how some people "work" and getting paid for that. > many are quick to press him on what's taking so long. > people are shouting at you that you need to work on something This is not normal even in a workplace! Article not necessarily about open source but workplaces in general (not even IT only) only difference is that people in workplaces are getting paid to work in those horrible conditions. Disclaimer: I'm unemployed, released some open source stuff https://mkws.sh/ https://mkws.sh/, https://adi.onl/projects.html https://adi.onl/projects.html and surviving as I can rather then being pressed or shouted at I need to work. I value my mental health, thanks!

jdrc 5y ago

I wonder if this will be expanded to 'open' content as well, i.e. people sabotaging their previously free content in order to steer people to paid content

BeFlatXIII 5y ago
Do you think archival services will become even more popular a reaction to preserve the previously-free content?

misslibby 5y ago

OMG - another one for the annals of ridiculous feminist claims: "The free nature of open source also leads to inequity. Open source is dominated by men, and people who don't have as much leisure time or stability might be less likely to contribute to open source when there's no compensation involved." So an article lamenting the horrible lives of FOSS open source developers who work for almost nothing then turns around and blames the same OS developers for driving women out of tech by working for free. Never mind that women tend to be paid by their husbands, so they would have lots of spare time for FOSS development.

DiabloD3 5y ago
Both what you quote and what you said are both asinine: I've met a lot of female FOSS developers, several of them have worked their ways into management positions at major companies. The era of pretending FOSS is a sausage party is over, and the use of this as a talking point needs to end.
- misslibby 5y ago
  So what of what I said is asinine? I only refer to the claims made by the article. I'd say calling FOSS a sausage fest is asinine.

gre 5y ago

$1 to read the article that says open source developers are putting the entire internet at risk. hmm

hogrider 5y ago

You want to sell software, just sell it, geez.

rs999gti 5y ago

> it's putting the entire internet at risk Mike Monteiro: F*ck You, Pay Me - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U

jgerrish 5y ago

I understand my view is different, but I want to build what half of these people built. Traps, noise, abusive environments. Then the clock. I'll keep saying it unfortunately :(.

panny 5y ago

Another project recently sabotaged intentionally is node-ipc. I'm surprised the article didn't mention it. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/03/sabotage-code-added-to-popular-npm-package-wiped-files-in-russia-and-belarus/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/03/sabot...

jnash 5y ago

If you give away your work for free and then complain and act all surprised/hurt when nobody pays you in return then you are the problem. Not the people using your work. Accept it and move on. Or make people pay for your work. It's that simple.

parasew 5y ago

Web3 is said to change this and incentivize development and maintenance of protocols and commons. There is a recent piece at decrypt suggesting that this creates another form of 'community'. Any opinions? Are Web3 ‘Communities’ Vapid or Authentic? Can we even call this communities? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30741332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30741332