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There's a very simple way to make that opinion count, you can hire the maintainer. Open source has been built on an endless stream of people making personal sa
by pyrale 4y ago
There's a very simple way to make that opinion count, you can hire the maintainer.
Open source has been built on an endless stream of people making personal sacrifices and often burning out. Seeing friends slowly getting devoured by anxiety crisis or burying themselves to support commercially used software, barely being thanked for what they give to the community, has been one of the most depressing parts of this industry.
If you don't support that particular piece of infrastructure, your opinions on it are worth zero. Even if you're a well-known open source maintainer, and some times even more so. It is understandable that people getting a comfortable job thanks to their contribution on a high-profile project have a different view from people that don't, but that doesn't make it a better view.
In retrospective, open source was bound to have these dynamics, with some people benefiting from their open-source work not seeing why people not paid to participate don't enjoy being told what to do. I wonder whether we'll see a friendlier environment in the future, or whether open-source will end up being a cooperative of companies sharing code among themselves.
- heavyset_go 4y agoAgree with this, and you've put it better than I would've.
- rsync 4y ago"There's a very simple way to make that opinion count, you can hire the maintainer." I want to describe to you that this is very difficult - almost impossible. A long time ago I decided that I did, in fact, want my opinions on open source and free software to have more weight than a typical non-contributor and I have made dozens of valid, reasonable - even generous - offers to individuals and projects to advance certain design goals or feature requests - or even simple bug fixes. It's not that these offers (contract offers, bounties, straight up cash payments, sponsorship, etc.) were rejected - they are typically outright ignored. As in, radio silence. No response whatsoever. I know they got my message and I know they are ignoring it. I have some pop-psych / cultural analysis / personal anecdata as to why this is (almost always) the case ... I think you can easily sketch a caricature of someone who does something out of love or passion or as a personal challenge but has no way to connect that to expectations or deadlines, or any other personal involvement whatsoever. But whatever the explanation, be aware that your suggestion is not the magic bullet you think it is.
- pabs3 4y agoI've had the opposite experience, approaching a random FOSS maintainer asking them to add a feature my workplace wanted, they got it done pretty quickly. I wasn't involved in the contract/payment side of things though.
- NoGravitas 4y ago> In retrospective, open source was bound to have these dynamics, with some people benefiting from their open-source work not seeing why people not paid to participate don't enjoy being told what to do. In particular, it was bound to have those dynamics once the radical possibilities of the Free Software movement were recuperated by capitalism in the form of Open Source.