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I believe the problem of thankless maintenance is best solved with two things: the thanks (yes, we are all human and want recognition and appreciation from fell

I believe the problem of thankless maintenance is best solved with two things: the thanks (yes, we are all human and want recognition and appreciation from fellow humans)[0], and a stable employment (work for a good large business while open-sourcing what’s possible)[1]. If you do OSS for profit, then it can become a question of where is more money; but if you work a reliable job with insurance, relationships and other implications then the stakes may be a bit different. Many of the biggest OSS projects today were started by people who had no money in mind whatsoever. Some had other jobs, others were students, etc. If we feel relatively secure, we are driven by our innate desire to tinker, create cool things and show it off. [0] Undermined by LLMs that are used to gobble up your code and suggest it to others commercially and without attribution. [1] Undermined by low employment protections (if you can expect to be fired at any time, you would be less loyal), and by LLMs (whatever you open-source now more directly benefits Microsoft or whatever).

david_allison 3y ago
3. More maintainers Days of 100+ notifications aren't easy. Things will slip through
- strogonoff 3y ago
  Agreed, but especially in light of recent events it’d be important to know who they are, and that’s not always easy.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> and a stable employment (work for a good large business while open-sourcing what’s possible) Even if it was hypothetically possible to open-source basically everything that the team in which I work produces: The software that I work on is very specialized software that is used by the company's employees and customers for specialized purposes. Imagine some nice LoB application that is actually somewhat comfortable to use. It basically does "what the users need" and is thus deeply ingrained in some parts of the company's workflows. The only use someone outside the industry might have for it is "cosplaying being employed in this industry". A lot of software that is developed (in particular in companies that don't sell or rent software) is of this kind. Thus: the open-source scene does in my opinion not have any use for a huge amount of software that is actually developed and actively used.
- strogonoff 3y ago
  > The software that I work on is very specialized software that is used by the company's employees and customers for specialized purposes Oh really? Welcome to the club. Our very specialized software for very specialized purposes used Django with a certain auth provider. So I refactored that into a standalone Django app that painlessly handles this specific OAuth provider, configurable via settings with sane defaults, and open-sourced it. (The refactoring was very beneficial to myself, that part of the project got instantly nicer to work with.) Of course, it is small beans compared to something algorithmically hardcore (I was a junior myself back then), but it’s just an example. Any software, no matter how specialized and bespoke, can be expressed as many self-contained isolated components that individually know nothing about that specialization and bespokeness. In fact, such factoring is generally a sign of good design: you may have heard of the loose coupling & high cohesion principle—once you follow it, open-sourcing a particular component is very straightforward. Note, though, that if your contract has certain licensing provisions in certain countries you may not be allowed to unilaterally open-source anything during the full term of employment (even if it is unrelated to your dayjob). You may need to get approval first. However, many good tech companies are reasonable when it comes to open-sourcing non-core components.

david_allison 3y ago

3. More maintainers Days of 100+ notifications aren't easy. Things will slip through

strogonoff 3y ago
Agreed, but especially in light of recent events it’d be important to know who they are, and that’s not always easy.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago

> and a stable employment (work for a good large business while open-sourcing what’s possible) Even if it was hypothetically possible to open-source basically everything that the team in which I work produces: The software that I work on is very specialized software that is used by the company's employees and customers for specialized purposes. Imagine some nice LoB application that is actually somewhat comfortable to use. It basically does "what the users need" and is thus deeply ingrained in some parts of the company's workflows. The only use someone outside the industry might have for it is "cosplaying being employed in this industry". A lot of software that is developed (in particular in companies that don't sell or rent software) is of this kind. Thus: the open-source scene does in my opinion not have any use for a huge amount of software that is actually developed and actively used.

strogonoff 3y ago
> The software that I work on is very specialized software that is used by the company's employees and customers for specialized purposes Oh really? Welcome to the club. Our very specialized software for very specialized purposes used Django with a certain auth provider. So I refactored that into a standalone Django app that painlessly handles this specific OAuth provider, configurable via settings with sane defaults, and open-sourced it. (The refactoring was very beneficial to myself, that part of the project got instantly nicer to work with.) Of course, it is small beans compared to something algorithmically hardcore (I was a junior myself back then), but it’s just an example. Any software, no matter how specialized and bespoke, can be expressed as many self-contained isolated components that individually know nothing about that specialization and bespokeness. In fact, such factoring is generally a sign of good design: you may have heard of the loose coupling & high cohesion principle—once you follow it, open-sourcing a particular component is very straightforward. Note, though, that if your contract has certain licensing provisions in certain countries you may not be allowed to unilaterally open-source anything during the full term of employment (even if it is unrelated to your dayjob). You may need to get approval first. However, many good tech companies are reasonable when it comes to open-sourcing non-core components.