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> OSS burnout. Very few FOSS projects are lucky enough to have grown a sustainable and supportive community. Most of the time, it seems to be a never-ending par
by api 2y ago
> OSS burnout. Very few FOSS projects are lucky enough to have grown a sustainable and supportive community. Most of the time, it seems to be a never-ending parade of angry demands with very little reward. When the software labour market was growing steadily, burned out maintainers often got replaced by fresh-eyed graduates or coders who relied on the project at work.
This is big not just because of angry demanding "gimme free stuff slave!" users but burn-out due to the realization that open source in 2024 is often just free labor for SaaS companies.
Open source should not be considered "free." It should be a kind of gift culture where one is expected to give something back. Showing up with angry demands for something someone made for free makes you a parasite and an asshole.
- Multicomp 2y agoYeah you used to be able to get nerd street cred as an OSS maintainer, and the cost was your time and willingness to work on A) the code and B) whatever contribution processes you/others came up with. The downsides were known. Now, you have this yawning chasm opening of large companies taking your work and selling it back to you, or LLMs remixing your work and diffusing it out, both demotivating factors that combined with the economic insecurity and COVID lockdowns forcing people to re-evaluate their hobby priorities, I'm not surprised there's less maintainers.