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Long time ago Sourceforge and then GitHub promoted into the current default the model of open source distribution which is not sustainable and I doubt it is som

Long time ago Sourceforge and then GitHub promoted into the current default the model of open source distribution which is not sustainable and I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind. Open source licenses are about freedom of using and modifying software. The movement grew out of frustration that commercial software cannot be freely improved and fixed by the user to better fit the user's needs. To create Free software, you ship sources together with your binaries and one of the OSI-approved licenses, that is all. The currently default model of having an open issue tracker, accepting third party pull requests, doing code reviews, providing support by email or chat, timely security patches etc, has nothing to do with open source and is not sustainable. This is OK if it is done for a hobby project as long as the author is having fun doing this work, but as soon as the software is used for commercial, production critical systems, the default expectation that authors will be promptly responding to new GitHub issues, bug reports and provide patches for free is insane. This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid.

spicyusername 9mo ago
has nothing to do with open source long time ago Sourceforge is almost 30 years old. GitHub almost 20. How long does something have to be done a certain way for it to be "to do with"? I would say we're now two generations deep of software engineers who came up with open source software commonly being mediated through public issue trackers. That isn't to say it needs to stay that way, just that I think a lot of people do in fact associate public project tracking with open source software.
- mnw21cam 9mo ago
  Thanks for making me feel old.
  - wrs 9mo ago
    I'll just say that I once installed Emacs from a 9-track magtape that someone mailed to me.
vladms 9mo ago
> the default expectation that authors will be promptly responding to new GitHub issues, bug reports and provide patches for free is insane. I think there are many insane expectations out there, open source or not, so I don't personally see it that linked with the idea/ideal of open source. > This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid. Anything can be paid, nobody says otherwise. Some people prefer nobody pays for their source code (open source). Other people do support for free. And so on. > The currently default model of having ... has nothing to do with open source and is not sustainable. There were always arguments why open source will not be sustainable, many having some truth in them. But the current issue can be probably solved with some push-back on the speed of things or how attribution works. Something similar used to happen on some forums: you can't post a new thread for one month if you did not reply at least once without getting down-voted. For the current problem : if contributions are anonymous for the first 3 years of you contributing (if you are not banned) and your name becomes public only after, then all this "noise" for "advertisement" will die. Doubt this will discourage any well intentioned contributor.
klez 9mo ago
> I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind. Free Software sure, that wasn't the point. Open Source, that was exactly the point. Eric S Raymond, one of the original promoters of the concept of Open Source coined Linus' Law: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow Which definitely points in the direction of receiving bug reports and patches from users of the application. He was also a proponent of the Bazaar model, where software is developed in public, as opposed to the Cathedral model where software is only released in milestones (he used GCC and Emacs as examples, which reinforces the part of your statement about the Free Software movement in particular).
- ambicapter 9mo ago
  Linus’ Law doesn’t really imply anything about maintainers behavior though. As an example, you can imagine maintainers that never update their repos. Every bug fix is a forking of the repo, and people only use the repo with the latest commits. Eventually, the bug count goes down as well!
- pixl97 9mo ago
  ESR is also from a time where spamming countless reports/junk code wasn't really a concept. They did have things like trolls and zealots that thought "Their one idea" was a gift from god and the maintainers were idiots for not adding it to the application. And eventually those people may have been banned from mailing lists. But in general the people posting code were typically well known and had some interest in fixing the application for some useful purpose. Simply put, no idealism stands the test of time without change. Nature shows us that everything must evolve or it goes extinct. How 'free software' evolves is now up for debate.
- solaris2007 9mo ago
  ESR was from a time that was radically different than the the VSCode / brew / macOS / Ubuntu centric era we have today. https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe5
NegativeK 9mo ago
> has nothing to do with open source I partially disagree. It does have to do with open source: Github (et al) are about creating a community around an open source project. It's hard to get adoption without a community; it gives you valid bug reports, use cases you didn't think of, and patches. You can, if you want, turn off PRs, issues, and literally any feedback from the outside world. But most people don't want that. > and is not sustainable I 100% agree. People (including people at for profit companies) are taking advantage of the communities that open source maintainers are trying to build and manipulating guilt and a sense of duty to get their way. The most insidious burnout I see is in disorganized volunteer communities. A volunteer is praised for jumping in with both feet, pushes themselves really hard, is rewarded vocally and often and with more authority, and is often the one applying the most pressure to themselves. There's no supervisor to tell them to pace themselves. And when their view switches from idealistic to realistic and then falls into pessimistic, they view the environment through a toxic lens. Then they vanish.
- pixl97 9mo ago
  Yea, and before we got issue trackers quite commonly issues and code chunks were shared via email lists that quite commonly had online archives. Think things kind of like the LKML.
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  > You can, if you want, turn off PRs, issues, and literally any feedback from the outside world. But most people don't want that. Literally you cannot, you can turn off "Issues", but you cannot turn of pull requests, Microsoft/GitHub forces you to leave that open for others to submit PRs to your repositories no matter what you want.
- stryan 9mo ago
  > You can, if you want, turn off PRs, issues, and literally any feedback from the outside world. But most people don't want that. Just a note, you actually can't turn off PR's on Github repos. At least not permanently.
BugsJustFindMe 9mo ago
> This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid. It is paid, even if not in money. It seems like maybe you lack awareness of the other forms of capital and reward that exist, because your framing implicitly insists that financial capital is the only form of capital and that monetary reward is the only form of reward. But there are also a bunch of other forms of capital, like social, cultural, symbolic, etc. which you have missed, and there are non-capital (non-convertible) forms of reward, like feeling good about something. It's the entire reason why permissive licenses still preserve attribution. To wit, people maintain things literally all the time either purely for prestige, or because being a contributing member of a community, even a small one, makes them feel good, or because knowing that maintaining things leads others to also maintain things. There are both intrinsic and extrinsic non-monetary gains here. Stallman makes the same critical error in his foundational writings, so at least you're not alone in this. (A foundational read on the subject of the different forms of capital is Pierre Bourdieu's The Forms of Capital: https://www.scribd.com/document/859144970/P-Bourdieu-the-Forms-of-Capital https://www.scribd.com/document/859144970/P-Bourdieu-the-For...) (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Intrinsic_and_extrinsic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Intrinsic_and_extri...)
- nlawalker 9mo ago
  >people maintain things literally all the time either purely for prestige, or because being a contributing member of a community, even a small one, makes them feel good, or because knowing that maintaining things leads others to also maintain things. True, but the expectation means that taking on maintenance involves taking on and leveraging a large amount of reputational debt in a very risky way. If you release something to the world and place yourself in a high-visibility maintainer position, burn out on it and then decide to drop it, it's very hard to ensure that your legacy and reputation in perpetuity will be "released something great and did the world a solid by maintaining it for a while" as opposed to "person who overcommits, bails, and leaves the world in a jam".
  - BugsJustFindMe 9mo ago
    It is incontrovertible that the entirety of the open source / free software world exists, in a very fundamental way, because people experience personal reward by doing work that they give away for zero dollars. The existence of risk does not eliminate the existence of reward. It's called "expected value", and it's non-zero, and it's for the person to manage for themself like everything else in life. Working for equity also involves risk, and nobody says that it's not compensation. > If you release something to the world and place yourself in a high-visibility maintainer position, burn out on it and then decide to drop it, it's very hard to ensure that your legacy and reputation in perpetuity will be "released something great and did the world a solid by maintaining it for a while" as opposed to "person who overcommits, bails, and leaves the world in a jam". This is like saying you suffer reputational damage by retiring from a career. The claim is clearly absurd. It's not hard to step down from leading a project in a way that preserves reputation in the same way that it's not hard to leave a company without burning bridges. Some people are bad at being people and fail at both.
madeofpalk 9mo ago
> I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind Who cares? That was 30 years ago. How different were computers, programming, and the world back then? Things change over time. The world is not immutable.
- nullc 9mo ago
  The original model works, the new model significantly fails. LLMs have taken many cases that were on the border over the line into failure, by changing the resource management tradeoffs. (Both by giving valuable contributors a cheap way to get 'extra eyes' on their own terms, and by empowering a new generation of trisectors and trolls to flood out even the most efficient public submission pipelines).
jen20 9mo ago
> To create Free software, you ship sources together with your binaries and one of the OSI-approved licenses, that is all. Untrue. Shopping source with _some_ OSI-approved licenses makes the work Free software. Shipping it with others merely makes it open source software.
- MaxBarraclough 9mo ago
  Technically correct, but not an issue in practice. If you want a licence that's approved by the OSI but not the FSF, or vice versa, you have to go looking for it. If memory serves there are no licences in the latter category, and the few in the former category are very obscure.
1313ed01 9mo ago
I thought about this a lot recently and decided that the small, mostly complete, project I work on now, if I release it (I probably will), I will just post an archive somewhere with the source code, like in old days.
- toomuchtodo 9mo ago
  What about posting it read only on Github so folks can download and fork it but not bother you with inbound requests (discussions, PR, issues)?
  - 1313ed01 9mo ago
    I kind of do that already with my most recent project, developing it in my local fossil repo and each release I have a script that copies it to a local git-repo, tags it, and pushes it to GitHub. So the GitHub history just has a series of release commits. But the project is still open for issues and PRs. Can only be disabled on paid accounts, right? Never had anyone try yet. I had feedback through other channels, just not on GitHub, so maybe explicitly keeping all development offline has had the intended effect? I get a trickle of issues and PRs for my other repos where development is out in the open with every commit pushed to GitHub. But if it was discovered by drive-by LLM contributors I would still have annoying extra work, for no obvious benefit compared to just sharing archives. I do not think anyone (out of at least dozens) discovering any of my repos do that on GitHub, but from seeing my posts elsewhere. It's not like no one can fork a source code archive, even if it is like 3-4 git-commands to run instead of just a button to click.
TomasBM 9mo ago
I've also noticed this expectation. Where does it come from? FOSS means that the code to be free and open-source, not the schedule or the direction of its developer(s).
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  I dunno, I think at one point there was a similar merge as to what happened with "git and "github" where "open source the licensing" somehow became the same as "open source the collaborative and open software development process", and nowadays people get kind of confused when you say you're doing open source yet you don't accept pull/merge requests.
  - mixmastamyk 9mo ago
    I propose the FOOSSNO license, fuck off its open source, no obligation, for communication purposes. ;-)
    - embedding-shape 9mo ago
      Maybe WTFPL can send the message across? Could maybe make a V3 and add as a second point to it: "1. And don't tell me/ask me about it, just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO"
mixmastamyk 9mo ago
I don’t agree with this newer idea that has arisen that FOSS authors are “victims.” It’s up to you to set boundaries (or prices) and communicate them, like an adult. If one is still rude and entitled then ban them from the repo, or let people fork, but not before looking in the mirror first and reflecting at your own behavior. (I’m trying to imagine folks painting xfree86 maintainers as victims back in the day when xorg forked them for intransigence. The point is disagreements happen, deal with them.)
- otikik 9mo ago
  I think "we will ban and publicly shame you if you waste our time" is a very clear and adult boundary.
  - mixmastamyk 9mo ago
    It could be a childish overreaction. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46718635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46718635 As always it depends on the circumstances, but should default to quietly closing with WONTFIX. Others have said Daniel is typically helpful and respectful so there we go.
    - samus 9mo ago
      This is not the first time the curl project complains about bogus and excessive bug reports.
    - wtallis 9mo ago
      What you linked to is not really evidence, just an unsubstantiated allegation. Over the top public shaming is something that should be pretty easy to provide direct evidence of. When Linus Torvalds does it, it gets repeatedly brought up in forums like this for many years.
      - mixmastamyk 9mo ago
        I have no reason to believe it is a lie, and it sounds plausible. A 'public shaming' should be a last resort is my assertion, and I stand by it.
snowmobile 9mo ago
> This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid. What's stopping any open source maintainer from charging for their work?
- boca_honey 9mo ago
  Irrelevance. The moment you paywall a project, it’s a death sentence. Unless you have a unique and highly sought-after product (top 1%), someone else will just make a free alternative.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    Some projects were successful at charging for custom work and special support — sqlite for instance.
    - boca_honey 9mo ago
      Exactly, that's an example of a top 1% project. It even has a detailed Wikipedia article in 35 languages. That model won't fly with small to medium-sized, regular projects.
  - SoftTalker 9mo ago
    If you have just thrown the code out there, in case someone can use it, then who cares? If it's not something you intend to spend more time on, what difference does it make?
  - snowmobile 9mo ago
    Well yes, but that accomplishes the goal of not working for free. Either you get money for your work, or your users move on, freeing you of the burden of supporting the software.
nmz 9mo ago
I've often dreamed of a system where normal users, give money as a promotion for a certain issue to be fixed or even created, if the user wants feature X then he should be able to give an incentive towards that feature to be added into the software that they use, developers do bounties instead, the user doesn't have to give much only a dollar, but if many users want feature X, then the money/donations pool creating higher incentives until the task itself matches the level of work to be performed to achieve it until merged. The project managers also get a cut of all merges, testers also must approve of the merge and that feature X is the one they want. So the project manager gets to work and improve/reject features, the user gets control over the features of the project they want and developers get to pick specific features they would like to work on (sort of). everybody gets what they want (sort of). All via attaching $ to the issues of the software, not the people.
- carlosjobim 9mo ago
  Those normal users are better off instead purchasing software. Then they will be listened to by developers if they report a bug or suggest a feature. Because they represent an incredibly valuable user segment: paying customers.
  - nmz 9mo ago
    One of the most used paid and proprietary software is windows, and its users do not matter at all to how it implements its features.
    - llbbdd 9mo ago
      Most users of Windows get it for somewhere between free and $150, the fact that there is still a home edition of Windows is practically a loss leader to keep the business side ingrained. Enterprise licensees are the ones with the money and Microsoft will dedicate full-time engineers to their features if they can afford it.
    - chowells 9mo ago
      Users matter a ton to windows. Specifically, the users with a hundred thousand or more licenses. Their unhappiness threatens Windows' profits in a meaningful way. Why do you think all the new secure boot and TPM features were added to Windows 11? All that work wasn't free to implement. But big businesses really want that degree of secure fleet management, and they're the customers who matter. So going back to the GP - pay for software where you're in the largest organized user class. That's how you get power. Paying alone doesn't suffice.
reneberlin 9mo ago
I fully agree. The psychological burden is also high, what makes the maintainer feel miserable over time.
burningChrome 9mo ago
Years ago, I built what I thought was a pretty basic static site generator using HapiJS. I was using it for personal projects and after some convincing by friends, put it up on Github. My friends went on Reddit and posted it and then told me about it afterwards. It initially got some decent traction and then all of a sudden, all the pull requests came, all the feature requests and then all the bug reports. I kept telling people this was a side project, if they want to fork it go ahead, but this is not something I'm going to spend a ton of time on. Then all the hate started about how I put something out into the OSS community with no desire to support it. I was bad person, my code was shit and I should stop being a developer. That was my first and last OSS project. I applaud and respect the people who are committed to getting OSS out there, but for me, it was a horrible experience.
- cjblomqvist 9mo ago
  Far from all OSS projects are like this. Eg. https://www.viblo.se/talks/ https://www.viblo.se/talks/
- calenti 9mo ago
  Bitching is free and easier than making pull requests. And I bet it was 1 or 2 choads plus a variable pack of minions, not everyone. And Megacorp X can file all the bug reports they want, their lack of investment is not my urgency.
- hypfer 9mo ago
  Been there, done that, built walls. If you allow me to go on a meandering tangent/exploration: ___ I mean if you think about it, this outcome is more or less inevitable, given the environment we've created. The foundational building block being that people will always optimize for their own benefit and personal gain. They fundamentally have to, because no one else will. So that gives us a natural source of conflict, because not everyone is a builder (or at least not everyone believes that they would), meaning that they need to get someone else to do what they want to get done. You as a builder of course operate no different to that. You also want to optimize for your own personal gain. Where it is different though is that you do not rely that much on external resources to do that, given that you can create by your own. So these are our building blocks. To have a functioning societal system, we do want and need to allow people that don't to receive a decent-ish slice of the output of those that create for various reasons. Something something shared humanity, but also the fact that a society built out of autonomous builders quickly collapses. Plus multi-dimensionality, meaning that person A might be a builder in discipline X, but needs others to sustain themself in discipline Y. Society and all. Shared workload. The mechanism that regulates the flow of resources between these agents is friction. For example, social shaming for not sharing the fair part of what you're earning is friction. That is a constant eroding force and cost that is supposed to shift your internal mental calculus to make contributing to society the most sensible outcome. Equally so, the act of being protective of your time, demanding respect, boundaries and fair compensation is friction that is supposed to shift someone else's mental calculus to make fair treatment of you the most sensible outcome. ____ Okay, many words, but what the fuck am I on about? Here's where this self-regulating system implodes: In the last two decades or so, we have absolutely supercharged the mechanism of shaming and public pressure (rel: Twitter). Simultaneously though, we've also _vastly_ nerfed any forms of friction a builder might employ. (rel: GitHub as the default, being "nice and professional" as the default, etc.) And that is what simply is not working. But we're not talking about that properly, because any platforms we currently have for talking about stuff are absolutely and utterly dominated by those that do not create; meaning that they get to dictate the rules. In a very unsustainable way of course (see also collapse of democracy in general) but that is still the reality we find us in. ___ And that is _I think_ also where we can find solutions to these problems. Don't get me wrong, I'm not proposing to return to linus and tell people that they should be retroactively aborted for having made a mistake. There were many very important advancements we made culturally to push out toxicity. We will need to reintroduce friction though. Likewise, we will need re-engineer our communication spaces to shift the balance of power back to a sustainable equilibrium. Which doesn't mean "cold uncaring meritocracy" (also, what even is merit?) but it will mean not handing out ever-larger megaphones based on who is already screaming the loudest. ___ Anyway, TL;DR: It's the system, stupid. It is like this, because it can't be any else given the currently governing rules. Thanks for attending my Ted Talk.
tom_m 9mo ago
Totally agree. The expectations around what an OSS project should - or even must - have, do, and accommodate is absolutely insane. It boggles my mind sometimes as someone who grew up on OSS. I still contribute OSS and maintain some (small) projects, but I certainly don't feel compelled to support people. I often license MIT. People are grown ups, they can go fix their own issues.
ozim 9mo ago
You mischaracterize the problem. You write like the problem would be corporate freeloaders forcing bug fixes on the open source. Huge problem for successful OSS projects is like what we have for cURL right here - newbies trying to "earn badge of honor" for scoring CVE on high profile project. The variation of it is newbies trying to score OSS contribution on high profile project (hacktoberfest). In the end all of it is propping own CV to land a software engineering job or cybersecurity job by wannabes. As much as I don't want to do gatekeeping and especially "old" Linus Torvalds way of gatekeeping — cURL, Linux Kernel and many high profile projects require gatekeeping to go on forward. We didn't even start on the security side of things not to allow "shady contributors". I hate "CV proppers", "OSS as great marketing tool", "corporate freeloaders", "APT threat actors using OSS as attack vector" because they break nice things that we could have.
thayne 9mo ago
> I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind. From the beginning, GNU projects welcomed contributions, and discussions of bugs and features were in the public. Sure it was on mailing lists, not on Github, but it was more than just shipping sources with the binaries. That isn't to say you have to accept third party pull requests and have an open bug tracker to be free software/open source. Sqlite is a famous example that doesn't follow that model.

spicyusername 9mo ago

has nothing to do with open source long time ago Sourceforge is almost 30 years old. GitHub almost 20. How long does something have to be done a certain way for it to be "to do with"? I would say we're now two generations deep of software engineers who came up with open source software commonly being mediated through public issue trackers. That isn't to say it needs to stay that way, just that I think a lot of people do in fact associate public project tracking with open source software.

mnw21cam 9mo ago
Thanks for making me feel old.
- wrs 9mo ago
  I'll just say that I once installed Emacs from a 9-track magtape that someone mailed to me.

vladms 9mo ago

> the default expectation that authors will be promptly responding to new GitHub issues, bug reports and provide patches for free is insane. I think there are many insane expectations out there, open source or not, so I don't personally see it that linked with the idea/ideal of open source. > This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid. Anything can be paid, nobody says otherwise. Some people prefer nobody pays for their source code (open source). Other people do support for free. And so on. > The currently default model of having ... has nothing to do with open source and is not sustainable. There were always arguments why open source will not be sustainable, many having some truth in them. But the current issue can be probably solved with some push-back on the speed of things or how attribution works. Something similar used to happen on some forums: you can't post a new thread for one month if you did not reply at least once without getting down-voted. For the current problem : if contributions are anonymous for the first 3 years of you contributing (if you are not banned) and your name becomes public only after, then all this "noise" for "advertisement" will die. Doubt this will discourage any well intentioned contributor.

klez 9mo ago

> I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind. Free Software sure, that wasn't the point. Open Source, that was exactly the point. Eric S Raymond, one of the original promoters of the concept of Open Source coined Linus' Law: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow Which definitely points in the direction of receiving bug reports and patches from users of the application. He was also a proponent of the Bazaar model, where software is developed in public, as opposed to the Cathedral model where software is only released in milestones (he used GCC and Emacs as examples, which reinforces the part of your statement about the Free Software movement in particular).

ambicapter 9mo ago
Linus’ Law doesn’t really imply anything about maintainers behavior though. As an example, you can imagine maintainers that never update their repos. Every bug fix is a forking of the repo, and people only use the repo with the latest commits. Eventually, the bug count goes down as well!
pixl97 9mo ago
ESR is also from a time where spamming countless reports/junk code wasn't really a concept. They did have things like trolls and zealots that thought "Their one idea" was a gift from god and the maintainers were idiots for not adding it to the application. And eventually those people may have been banned from mailing lists. But in general the people posting code were typically well known and had some interest in fixing the application for some useful purpose. Simply put, no idealism stands the test of time without change. Nature shows us that everything must evolve or it goes extinct. How 'free software' evolves is now up for debate.
solaris2007 9mo ago
ESR was from a time that was radically different than the the VSCode / brew / macOS / Ubuntu centric era we have today. https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe5

NegativeK 9mo ago

> has nothing to do with open source I partially disagree. It does have to do with open source: Github (et al) are about creating a community around an open source project. It's hard to get adoption without a community; it gives you valid bug reports, use cases you didn't think of, and patches. You can, if you want, turn off PRs, issues, and literally any feedback from the outside world. But most people don't want that. > and is not sustainable I 100% agree. People (including people at for profit companies) are taking advantage of the communities that open source maintainers are trying to build and manipulating guilt and a sense of duty to get their way. The most insidious burnout I see is in disorganized volunteer communities. A volunteer is praised for jumping in with both feet, pushes themselves really hard, is rewarded vocally and often and with more authority, and is often the one applying the most pressure to themselves. There's no supervisor to tell them to pace themselves. And when their view switches from idealistic to realistic and then falls into pessimistic, they view the environment through a toxic lens. Then they vanish.

pixl97 9mo ago
Yea, and before we got issue trackers quite commonly issues and code chunks were shared via email lists that quite commonly had online archives. Think things kind of like the LKML.
embedding-shape 9mo ago
> You can, if you want, turn off PRs, issues, and literally any feedback from the outside world. But most people don't want that. Literally you cannot, you can turn off "Issues", but you cannot turn of pull requests, Microsoft/GitHub forces you to leave that open for others to submit PRs to your repositories no matter what you want.
stryan 9mo ago
> You can, if you want, turn off PRs, issues, and literally any feedback from the outside world. But most people don't want that. Just a note, you actually can't turn off PR's on Github repos. At least not permanently.

BugsJustFindMe 9mo ago

> This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid. It is paid, even if not in money. It seems like maybe you lack awareness of the other forms of capital and reward that exist, because your framing implicitly insists that financial capital is the only form of capital and that monetary reward is the only form of reward. But there are also a bunch of other forms of capital, like social, cultural, symbolic, etc. which you have missed, and there are non-capital (non-convertible) forms of reward, like feeling good about something. It's the entire reason why permissive licenses still preserve attribution. To wit, people maintain things literally all the time either purely for prestige, or because being a contributing member of a community, even a small one, makes them feel good, or because knowing that maintaining things leads others to also maintain things. There are both intrinsic and extrinsic non-monetary gains here. Stallman makes the same critical error in his foundational writings, so at least you're not alone in this. (A foundational read on the subject of the different forms of capital is Pierre Bourdieu's The Forms of Capital: https://www.scribd.com/document/859144970/P-Bourdieu-the-Forms-of-Capital https://www.scribd.com/document/859144970/P-Bourdieu-the-For...) (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Intrinsic_and_extrinsic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Intrinsic_and_extri...)

nlawalker 9mo ago
>people maintain things literally all the time either purely for prestige, or because being a contributing member of a community, even a small one, makes them feel good, or because knowing that maintaining things leads others to also maintain things. True, but the expectation means that taking on maintenance involves taking on and leveraging a large amount of reputational debt in a very risky way. If you release something to the world and place yourself in a high-visibility maintainer position, burn out on it and then decide to drop it, it's very hard to ensure that your legacy and reputation in perpetuity will be "released something great and did the world a solid by maintaining it for a while" as opposed to "person who overcommits, bails, and leaves the world in a jam".
- BugsJustFindMe 9mo ago
  It is incontrovertible that the entirety of the open source / free software world exists, in a very fundamental way, because people experience personal reward by doing work that they give away for zero dollars. The existence of risk does not eliminate the existence of reward. It's called "expected value", and it's non-zero, and it's for the person to manage for themself like everything else in life. Working for equity also involves risk, and nobody says that it's not compensation. > If you release something to the world and place yourself in a high-visibility maintainer position, burn out on it and then decide to drop it, it's very hard to ensure that your legacy and reputation in perpetuity will be "released something great and did the world a solid by maintaining it for a while" as opposed to "person who overcommits, bails, and leaves the world in a jam". This is like saying you suffer reputational damage by retiring from a career. The claim is clearly absurd. It's not hard to step down from leading a project in a way that preserves reputation in the same way that it's not hard to leave a company without burning bridges. Some people are bad at being people and fail at both.

madeofpalk 9mo ago

> I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind Who cares? That was 30 years ago. How different were computers, programming, and the world back then? Things change over time. The world is not immutable.

nullc 9mo ago
The original model works, the new model significantly fails. LLMs have taken many cases that were on the border over the line into failure, by changing the resource management tradeoffs. (Both by giving valuable contributors a cheap way to get 'extra eyes' on their own terms, and by empowering a new generation of trisectors and trolls to flood out even the most efficient public submission pipelines).

jen20 9mo ago

> To create Free software, you ship sources together with your binaries and one of the OSI-approved licenses, that is all. Untrue. Shopping source with _some_ OSI-approved licenses makes the work Free software. Shipping it with others merely makes it open source software.

MaxBarraclough 9mo ago
Technically correct, but not an issue in practice. If you want a licence that's approved by the OSI but not the FSF, or vice versa, you have to go looking for it. If memory serves there are no licences in the latter category, and the few in the former category are very obscure.

1313ed01 9mo ago

I thought about this a lot recently and decided that the small, mostly complete, project I work on now, if I release it (I probably will), I will just post an archive somewhere with the source code, like in old days.

toomuchtodo 9mo ago
What about posting it read only on Github so folks can download and fork it but not bother you with inbound requests (discussions, PR, issues)?
- 1313ed01 9mo ago
  I kind of do that already with my most recent project, developing it in my local fossil repo and each release I have a script that copies it to a local git-repo, tags it, and pushes it to GitHub. So the GitHub history just has a series of release commits. But the project is still open for issues and PRs. Can only be disabled on paid accounts, right? Never had anyone try yet. I had feedback through other channels, just not on GitHub, so maybe explicitly keeping all development offline has had the intended effect? I get a trickle of issues and PRs for my other repos where development is out in the open with every commit pushed to GitHub. But if it was discovered by drive-by LLM contributors I would still have annoying extra work, for no obvious benefit compared to just sharing archives. I do not think anyone (out of at least dozens) discovering any of my repos do that on GitHub, but from seeing my posts elsewhere. It's not like no one can fork a source code archive, even if it is like 3-4 git-commands to run instead of just a button to click.

TomasBM 9mo ago

I've also noticed this expectation. Where does it come from? FOSS means that the code to be free and open-source, not the schedule or the direction of its developer(s).

embedding-shape 9mo ago
I dunno, I think at one point there was a similar merge as to what happened with "git and "github" where "open source the licensing" somehow became the same as "open source the collaborative and open software development process", and nowadays people get kind of confused when you say you're doing open source yet you don't accept pull/merge requests.
- mixmastamyk 9mo ago
  I propose the FOOSSNO license, fuck off its open source, no obligation, for communication purposes. ;-)
  - embedding-shape 9mo ago
    Maybe WTFPL can send the message across? Could maybe make a V3 and add as a second point to it: "1. And don't tell me/ask me about it, just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO"

mixmastamyk 9mo ago

I don’t agree with this newer idea that has arisen that FOSS authors are “victims.” It’s up to you to set boundaries (or prices) and communicate them, like an adult. If one is still rude and entitled then ban them from the repo, or let people fork, but not before looking in the mirror first and reflecting at your own behavior. (I’m trying to imagine folks painting xfree86 maintainers as victims back in the day when xorg forked them for intransigence. The point is disagreements happen, deal with them.)

otikik 9mo ago
I think "we will ban and publicly shame you if you waste our time" is a very clear and adult boundary.
- mixmastamyk 9mo ago
  It could be a childish overreaction. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46718635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46718635 As always it depends on the circumstances, but should default to quietly closing with WONTFIX. Others have said Daniel is typically helpful and respectful so there we go.
  - samus 9mo ago
    This is not the first time the curl project complains about bogus and excessive bug reports.
  - wtallis 9mo ago
    What you linked to is not really evidence, just an unsubstantiated allegation. Over the top public shaming is something that should be pretty easy to provide direct evidence of. When Linus Torvalds does it, it gets repeatedly brought up in forums like this for many years.
    - mixmastamyk 9mo ago
      I have no reason to believe it is a lie, and it sounds plausible. A 'public shaming' should be a last resort is my assertion, and I stand by it.

snowmobile 9mo ago

> This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid. What's stopping any open source maintainer from charging for their work?

boca_honey 9mo ago
Irrelevance. The moment you paywall a project, it’s a death sentence. Unless you have a unique and highly sought-after product (top 1%), someone else will just make a free alternative.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  Some projects were successful at charging for custom work and special support — sqlite for instance.
  - boca_honey 9mo ago
    Exactly, that's an example of a top 1% project. It even has a detailed Wikipedia article in 35 languages. That model won't fly with small to medium-sized, regular projects.
- SoftTalker 9mo ago
  If you have just thrown the code out there, in case someone can use it, then who cares? If it's not something you intend to spend more time on, what difference does it make?
- snowmobile 9mo ago
  Well yes, but that accomplishes the goal of not working for free. Either you get money for your work, or your users move on, freeing you of the burden of supporting the software.

nmz 9mo ago

I've often dreamed of a system where normal users, give money as a promotion for a certain issue to be fixed or even created, if the user wants feature X then he should be able to give an incentive towards that feature to be added into the software that they use, developers do bounties instead, the user doesn't have to give much only a dollar, but if many users want feature X, then the money/donations pool creating higher incentives until the task itself matches the level of work to be performed to achieve it until merged. The project managers also get a cut of all merges, testers also must approve of the merge and that feature X is the one they want. So the project manager gets to work and improve/reject features, the user gets control over the features of the project they want and developers get to pick specific features they would like to work on (sort of). everybody gets what they want (sort of). All via attaching $ to the issues of the software, not the people.

carlosjobim 9mo ago
Those normal users are better off instead purchasing software. Then they will be listened to by developers if they report a bug or suggest a feature. Because they represent an incredibly valuable user segment: paying customers.
- nmz 9mo ago
  One of the most used paid and proprietary software is windows, and its users do not matter at all to how it implements its features.
  - llbbdd 9mo ago
    Most users of Windows get it for somewhere between free and $150, the fact that there is still a home edition of Windows is practically a loss leader to keep the business side ingrained. Enterprise licensees are the ones with the money and Microsoft will dedicate full-time engineers to their features if they can afford it.
  - chowells 9mo ago
    Users matter a ton to windows. Specifically, the users with a hundred thousand or more licenses. Their unhappiness threatens Windows' profits in a meaningful way. Why do you think all the new secure boot and TPM features were added to Windows 11? All that work wasn't free to implement. But big businesses really want that degree of secure fleet management, and they're the customers who matter. So going back to the GP - pay for software where you're in the largest organized user class. That's how you get power. Paying alone doesn't suffice.

reneberlin 9mo ago

I fully agree. The psychological burden is also high, what makes the maintainer feel miserable over time.

burningChrome 9mo ago

Years ago, I built what I thought was a pretty basic static site generator using HapiJS. I was using it for personal projects and after some convincing by friends, put it up on Github. My friends went on Reddit and posted it and then told me about it afterwards. It initially got some decent traction and then all of a sudden, all the pull requests came, all the feature requests and then all the bug reports. I kept telling people this was a side project, if they want to fork it go ahead, but this is not something I'm going to spend a ton of time on. Then all the hate started about how I put something out into the OSS community with no desire to support it. I was bad person, my code was shit and I should stop being a developer. That was my first and last OSS project. I applaud and respect the people who are committed to getting OSS out there, but for me, it was a horrible experience.

cjblomqvist 9mo ago
Far from all OSS projects are like this. Eg. https://www.viblo.se/talks/ https://www.viblo.se/talks/
calenti 9mo ago
Bitching is free and easier than making pull requests. And I bet it was 1 or 2 choads plus a variable pack of minions, not everyone. And Megacorp X can file all the bug reports they want, their lack of investment is not my urgency.
hypfer 9mo ago
Been there, done that, built walls. If you allow me to go on a meandering tangent/exploration: ___ I mean if you think about it, this outcome is more or less inevitable, given the environment we've created. The foundational building block being that people will always optimize for their own benefit and personal gain. They fundamentally have to, because no one else will. So that gives us a natural source of conflict, because not everyone is a builder (or at least not everyone believes that they would), meaning that they need to get someone else to do what they want to get done. You as a builder of course operate no different to that. You also want to optimize for your own personal gain. Where it is different though is that you do not rely that much on external resources to do that, given that you can create by your own. So these are our building blocks. To have a functioning societal system, we do want and need to allow people that don't to receive a decent-ish slice of the output of those that create for various reasons. Something something shared humanity, but also the fact that a society built out of autonomous builders quickly collapses. Plus multi-dimensionality, meaning that person A might be a builder in discipline X, but needs others to sustain themself in discipline Y. Society and all. Shared workload. The mechanism that regulates the flow of resources between these agents is friction. For example, social shaming for not sharing the fair part of what you're earning is friction. That is a constant eroding force and cost that is supposed to shift your internal mental calculus to make contributing to society the most sensible outcome. Equally so, the act of being protective of your time, demanding respect, boundaries and fair compensation is friction that is supposed to shift someone else's mental calculus to make fair treatment of you the most sensible outcome. ____ Okay, many words, but what the fuck am I on about? Here's where this self-regulating system implodes: In the last two decades or so, we have absolutely supercharged the mechanism of shaming and public pressure (rel: Twitter). Simultaneously though, we've also _vastly_ nerfed any forms of friction a builder might employ. (rel: GitHub as the default, being "nice and professional" as the default, etc.) And that is what simply is not working. But we're not talking about that properly, because any platforms we currently have for talking about stuff are absolutely and utterly dominated by those that do not create; meaning that they get to dictate the rules. In a very unsustainable way of course (see also collapse of democracy in general) but that is still the reality we find us in. ___ And that is _I think_ also where we can find solutions to these problems. Don't get me wrong, I'm not proposing to return to linus and tell people that they should be retroactively aborted for having made a mistake. There were many very important advancements we made culturally to push out toxicity. We will need to reintroduce friction though. Likewise, we will need re-engineer our communication spaces to shift the balance of power back to a sustainable equilibrium. Which doesn't mean "cold uncaring meritocracy" (also, what even is merit?) but it will mean not handing out ever-larger megaphones based on who is already screaming the loudest. ___ Anyway, TL;DR: It's the system, stupid. It is like this, because it can't be any else given the currently governing rules. Thanks for attending my Ted Talk.

tom_m 9mo ago

Totally agree. The expectations around what an OSS project should - or even must - have, do, and accommodate is absolutely insane. It boggles my mind sometimes as someone who grew up on OSS. I still contribute OSS and maintain some (small) projects, but I certainly don't feel compelled to support people. I often license MIT. People are grown ups, they can go fix their own issues.

ozim 9mo ago

You mischaracterize the problem. You write like the problem would be corporate freeloaders forcing bug fixes on the open source. Huge problem for successful OSS projects is like what we have for cURL right here - newbies trying to "earn badge of honor" for scoring CVE on high profile project. The variation of it is newbies trying to score OSS contribution on high profile project (hacktoberfest). In the end all of it is propping own CV to land a software engineering job or cybersecurity job by wannabes. As much as I don't want to do gatekeeping and especially "old" Linus Torvalds way of gatekeeping — cURL, Linux Kernel and many high profile projects require gatekeeping to go on forward. We didn't even start on the security side of things not to allow "shady contributors". I hate "CV proppers", "OSS as great marketing tool", "corporate freeloaders", "APT threat actors using OSS as attack vector" because they break nice things that we could have.

thayne 9mo ago

> I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind. From the beginning, GNU projects welcomed contributions, and discussions of bugs and features were in the public. Sure it was on mailing lists, not on Github, but it was more than just shipping sources with the binaries. That isn't to say you have to accept third party pull requests and have an open bug tracker to be free software/open source. Sqlite is a famous example that doesn't follow that model.