5 ms·

Burnout is real for open source maintainers

asim 4mo ago
I wrote recently about bringing back my open source project back from the dead. It's more than a decade old. Many life events occured during that time. It's tough. It's nothing like Lodash but honestly these things ebb and flow. It operates in cycles just as life does. Wish him all the best. Sounds like he had many tough years personally and I can relate. https://go-micro.dev/blog/27 https://go-micro.dev/blog/27
- reactordev 4mo ago
  There’s only so many sprints you can do back to back to back… you are correct, things ebb and flow and they’ll relax and life will happen and they’ll come back and either pick it up or start a new. It’s OK. It’s all OK.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
Devasta 4mo ago
This is unironically why the AGPL3 is the best license. No need to worry about "virality" or derivative works or any of that, just set it and forget it. On top of that, corporations will avoid you like the plague, ensuring that your audience is other AGPL3 users.
- arikrahman 4mo ago
  I am happy with the network solution AGPL provides on top of GPL. I think a new AGPL version needs to come out that addresses rewriting codebases with AI and claiming new original work.
  - FinnLobsien 4mo ago
    How would you enforce that? I'm genuinely curious. It's nearly impossible to conclusively prove someone rewrote your codebase with AI.
    - Raed667 4mo ago
      Unless they proudly claim it as they seem so keen to do
    - dovesky 4mo ago
      I don't think you can, which is also why Open Source is effectively dead thanks to AI.
      - abc42 4mo ago
        As long as open source projects avoid using AI, surely? Why wouldn't they be able to reap the benefits also?
      - 0xbadcafebee 4mo ago
        Open Source is a movement of people who want to voluntarily collaborate on and share software. As long as there are people who want to do that, it will continue. I don't see anyone suddenly stopping doing that just because AI exists. Lots of open source projects are banning AI contributions, yet they're chugging along just as before. Honestly I think we're going to see a lot less AI-written code in the future, and more AI-assistance (PR reviews, documentation, security scans, scaffolding, brainstorming, test suites, etc). Example: to ship one feature for my open source project with a collaborator, we went back and forth for a month to agree on the change, test it, approve it, merge it. The code was pretty tiny. We could get more contributions faster if AI can help us tighten up that lifecycle.
        FinnLobsien 4mo ago
        Yeah I agree. I think whether we see more or less AI-written code is very much down to where. Adding a new filter option for in-product analytics (assuming that data is being captured) is something AI can do reasonably well. But things like “how should our orchestration layer be architected” isn’t a question of execution, so AI won’t be much use.
  - avaer 4mo ago
    > I think a new AGPL version needs to come out that addresses rewriting codebases with AI and claiming new original work. I agree. In the current state of OSS, if you AGPL something meaningful, someone else will re-slopfactor into MIT and take the credit, while being glorified for providing a more "open" alternative. Or they just ask the AI to port your AGPL code into their proprietary codebase and not tell anyone. Enforcement of license violations in the age of AI needs a 180.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago
  I've used MIT almost exclusively for anything I've published, under multiple identities, and seems to work fine too. What benefit would AGPL3 give me over MIT, in terms of avoiding burnout? So far, saying "No" or not working for free for companies, been working fine as an approach so far, but always open to hearing even better approaches.
  - hilariously 4mo ago
    It prevents the No from ever materializing because almost no one wants to use your code to build on top of.
    - embedding-shape 4mo ago
      How am I supposed to practice saying "No" in low-stakes situations then? :|
      - hilariously 4mo ago
        I would tell you but I am practicing right now.
  - greenavocado 4mo ago
    There's also the MIT+NIRREG (misspelling intentional) license plusnirreg.com (misspelling intentional) is the home page of the license It's also AGPL compatible! > Why? By including the word "NXXXXXX" in a LICENSE file that must be distributed with the software you will ensure: The software will not be used or hosted by western corporations that promote censorship The software will not be used or hosted by compromised individuals that promote censorship Users of the software will be immune to attacks that would result in censorship of others
FinnLobsien 4mo ago
If you have a hobby project like writing a blog, crocheting, or almost any other creative hobby, you can dip in and out however it suits you. If you deal with major life events, sicknesses, etc., you can leave the hobby and come back. Nobody is paying you for it, so nobody can complain (maybe the friends who miss you, but it's not actively impacting the real world). Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure. It's like if you loved crocheting, but somehow if you stopped crocheting everyone in your city would no longer have clothes and need to walk around naked.
- subygan 4mo ago
  and nobody is willing to pay for it.
  - FinnLobsien 4mo ago
    The value created vs value captured equation of OSS must be one of the most lopsided things ever. If you’re at Google and invent Kubernetes you might still capture 0.000001% (probably less) of the economic value created by Kubernetes, but you probably enjoy very generous comp. OSS doesn’t have any of that, besides being extremely in demand as a consultant or whatever.
    - avaer 4mo ago
      > besides being extremely in demand as a consultant or whatever Not necessarily. AI has significantly reduced the marketability of that angle, when people can just ask AI about your OSS project. That is to say, it's only getting more lopsided.
      - FinnLobsien 4mo ago
        Sure, but I also feel like at the higher level, you’re not necessarily looking for implementation alone, but for “what should we be doing in the first place?”, which AI can’t help with
  - 4mo ago
bstsb 4mo ago
> This conversation was initially just a phone call, but was so powerful that we decided to turn it into a blog and share the audio via YouTube i can tell - it looks like the blog post doesn't really add anything over a direct transcript of the call itself. it's just a bland summary of the really interesting story Dalton told
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- eterm 4mo ago
  It's also likely an AI generated blogpost over the original content.
cronelius 4mo ago
So does this mean no Lodash 5?
dheera 4mo ago
I had an open source project (https://github.com/dheera/rosboard https://github.com/dheera/rosboard) that I burned out and didn't really do a good job continue maintaining. * I was burned out from work politics at the same time, and had to prioritize fighting those work politics since that's what was paying me. By the end of each day at that company, I didn't feel like staring at a screen any more * I would get a flurry of poorly-tested pull requests that would break it for some users * I got lots of suggestions of <feature to implement> which weren't well thought out for how to generalize * No actually good engineer stepped up to say "I want to help with this" * There was a commercial alternative that had gotten funding and they were better at marketing
Joel_Mckay 4mo ago
Corollary: if software requires constant revisions it didn't actually cover the initial problem scope, and degenerated into a high-latency service state-machine powered by coders. =3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
- mezyt 4mo ago
  Makes sense for small tool like ls, and doesn't for things that are actually complex like the python language or sqlite.
  - Joel_Mckay 4mo ago
    It is a common misconception that permutation is progress, and popularity is justification for poor design-pattern choices. Spiraling complexity often eventually implodes out-of-band ecosystems sooner or later. =3
- jnwatson 4mo ago
  The very idea of "let's just write it correct the first time" is itself very much a second system fallacy.
  - Joel_Mckay 4mo ago
    Standard project release cycles build to a design specification, clearly defining phases of what is acceptable and when. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level One way to enforce implementation convergence is to define core unit tests before coding even begins. If people just ignored communication, the results are rather predictable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law Building something that doesn't need patched every week is impossible for some. =3
hypfer 4mo ago
I find the term "burnout" in context of FOSS quite infuriating, as it is usually being used to invalidate a real problem. Instead of talking about concrete misbehavior by concrete individuals or institutions, "oh that poor guy is suffering from foss burnout" is thrown in, and instantly, any thought or action that might change anything about the situation is stopped and discarded. It depersonalizes a problem that is _very_ personal. Diffusing responsibility to no one, while at the same time reframing valid logical callouts as emotionally driven nonsense that can be ignored. __ In essence, "FOSS Burnout" is this hybrid between victim blaming and blaming the universe, while in reality it's a real person at that very moment doing something unethical to another human being. We need to stop talking about useless higher-level concepts and start talking about concrete bad behavior that could be instantly stopped. __ If you've read "it diffuses responsibility to no one" and thought "oh, hey! corporate! Asscovering!", then yes. You got it. That's why this trope keeps coming up. It's no grassroots thing. It's engineered to keep the meat grinder running. Nothing else. And the worst part is that it shows up even without corporate involvement, because it seeped into the defaults people apply without thinking.
- jlg23 4mo ago
  I think you are doing the post injustice by hijacking it. FOSS maintainers can get a burnout even without toxic users - hard deadlines and the understanding that people really rely on your project can do that to you. e.g.: About 25 years I had developed some blogging software in the style of usemod (single executable, data stored in ./data) for coordination of and reporting about protests on throwaway VMs. This initially was a weekend project but spiraled out of control when it made its way through Europe and people called me for setups or features for other actions. My burnout was the result of trying to help grass root organizations while also being politically active myself and having a full time job. The solution was basically what the article says: * invited more maintainers by dumbing down the implementation so that one does not need a black belt in perl to hack on it * created minimal docs * I found hoster in the scene who was competent and willing to do pro bono hosting in exchange for me being available in case of problems (he never called me).
  - hypfer 4mo ago
piker 4mo ago
We bumped into this at one point looking to switch our Rust GUI framework and found the best alternatives also suffered a core issue because they both (and almost all Rust GUI frameworks) depended on the same `winit` crate. The `winit` maintainer seemed massively under water. We wrote about it: https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop Honestly, I don't know if open source works outside of a few massive projects any more.
randomuser558 4mo ago
[flagged]
ricardobeat 4mo ago
I remember the creator of Lodash being quite abrasive in the early days, when the library was surfacing as an alternative fork of underscore.js. Life does you a number.
jrpt 4mo ago
Instead of going open source, consider selling licenses with Supported Source (https://supso.org/ https://supso.org/). I made this for the maintainer problem: it's easy to burnout when companies are constantly asking for new features or fixes, while not paying you anything. Why should you work for free so these companies can make more profits? When they start paying you, you're a lot happier about it.
aleph_minus_one 4mo ago
> When people talk about burnout in open source, the conversation often centers on workload, too many issues, too many requests, too much responsibility. Why not simply ignore all this stuff by the maxim "my software - my vision": - If some request does not serve your vision for the software: close it. - If you cannot handle the workload: work less on the program. - If issues exist which you cannot fix very fast: take your time to fix it. Nobody is willing to pay you big money for fixing the issue, so a fix does not seem to be very urgent for the users. - Too much responsibility: if the software was indeed such an important piece of infrastructure, people would pay you big money for you to maintain it.
carlosjobim 4mo ago
Step 1: I'm gonna work for free! Step 2: Oh no! These people are taking advantage of me! Who would have guessed? Honest people want to pay others for their work, so if you explicitly want to work for free, you will attract all types of sleaze balls who are looking for somebody to take advantage of. Step out of the FOSS swamp and step into human dignity.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
impact_sy 4mo ago
Working on open source is truly exhausting; when I couldn't balance my work and personal life, I gave it up. Just a side note: I am an Apache PMC member.

asim 4mo ago

I wrote recently about bringing back my open source project back from the dead. It's more than a decade old. Many life events occured during that time. It's tough. It's nothing like Lodash but honestly these things ebb and flow. It operates in cycles just as life does. Wish him all the best. Sounds like he had many tough years personally and I can relate. https://go-micro.dev/blog/27 https://go-micro.dev/blog/27

reactordev 4mo ago
There’s only so many sprints you can do back to back to back… you are correct, things ebb and flow and they’ll relax and life will happen and they’ll come back and either pick it up or start a new. It’s OK. It’s all OK.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

Devasta 4mo ago

This is unironically why the AGPL3 is the best license. No need to worry about "virality" or derivative works or any of that, just set it and forget it. On top of that, corporations will avoid you like the plague, ensuring that your audience is other AGPL3 users.

arikrahman 4mo ago
I am happy with the network solution AGPL provides on top of GPL. I think a new AGPL version needs to come out that addresses rewriting codebases with AI and claiming new original work.
- FinnLobsien 4mo ago
  How would you enforce that? I'm genuinely curious. It's nearly impossible to conclusively prove someone rewrote your codebase with AI.
  - Raed667 4mo ago
    Unless they proudly claim it as they seem so keen to do
  - dovesky 4mo ago
    I don't think you can, which is also why Open Source is effectively dead thanks to AI.
    - abc42 4mo ago
      As long as open source projects avoid using AI, surely? Why wouldn't they be able to reap the benefits also?
    - 0xbadcafebee 4mo ago
      Open Source is a movement of people who want to voluntarily collaborate on and share software. As long as there are people who want to do that, it will continue. I don't see anyone suddenly stopping doing that just because AI exists. Lots of open source projects are banning AI contributions, yet they're chugging along just as before. Honestly I think we're going to see a lot less AI-written code in the future, and more AI-assistance (PR reviews, documentation, security scans, scaffolding, brainstorming, test suites, etc). Example: to ship one feature for my open source project with a collaborator, we went back and forth for a month to agree on the change, test it, approve it, merge it. The code was pretty tiny. We could get more contributions faster if AI can help us tighten up that lifecycle.
      - FinnLobsien 4mo ago
        Yeah I agree. I think whether we see more or less AI-written code is very much down to where. Adding a new filter option for in-product analytics (assuming that data is being captured) is something AI can do reasonably well. But things like “how should our orchestration layer be architected” isn’t a question of execution, so AI won’t be much use.
- avaer 4mo ago
  > I think a new AGPL version needs to come out that addresses rewriting codebases with AI and claiming new original work. I agree. In the current state of OSS, if you AGPL something meaningful, someone else will re-slopfactor into MIT and take the credit, while being glorified for providing a more "open" alternative. Or they just ask the AI to port your AGPL code into their proprietary codebase and not tell anyone. Enforcement of license violations in the age of AI needs a 180.
embedding-shape 4mo ago
I've used MIT almost exclusively for anything I've published, under multiple identities, and seems to work fine too. What benefit would AGPL3 give me over MIT, in terms of avoiding burnout? So far, saying "No" or not working for free for companies, been working fine as an approach so far, but always open to hearing even better approaches.
- hilariously 4mo ago
  It prevents the No from ever materializing because almost no one wants to use your code to build on top of.
  - embedding-shape 4mo ago
    How am I supposed to practice saying "No" in low-stakes situations then? :|
    - hilariously 4mo ago
      I would tell you but I am practicing right now.
- greenavocado 4mo ago
  There's also the MIT+NIRREG (misspelling intentional) license plusnirreg.com (misspelling intentional) is the home page of the license It's also AGPL compatible! > Why? By including the word "NXXXXXX" in a LICENSE file that must be distributed with the software you will ensure: The software will not be used or hosted by western corporations that promote censorship The software will not be used or hosted by compromised individuals that promote censorship Users of the software will be immune to attacks that would result in censorship of others

FinnLobsien 4mo ago

If you have a hobby project like writing a blog, crocheting, or almost any other creative hobby, you can dip in and out however it suits you. If you deal with major life events, sicknesses, etc., you can leave the hobby and come back. Nobody is paying you for it, so nobody can complain (maybe the friends who miss you, but it's not actively impacting the real world). Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure. It's like if you loved crocheting, but somehow if you stopped crocheting everyone in your city would no longer have clothes and need to walk around naked.

subygan 4mo ago
and nobody is willing to pay for it.
- FinnLobsien 4mo ago
  The value created vs value captured equation of OSS must be one of the most lopsided things ever. If you’re at Google and invent Kubernetes you might still capture 0.000001% (probably less) of the economic value created by Kubernetes, but you probably enjoy very generous comp. OSS doesn’t have any of that, besides being extremely in demand as a consultant or whatever.
  - avaer 4mo ago
    > besides being extremely in demand as a consultant or whatever Not necessarily. AI has significantly reduced the marketability of that angle, when people can just ask AI about your OSS project. That is to say, it's only getting more lopsided.
    - FinnLobsien 4mo ago
      Sure, but I also feel like at the higher level, you’re not necessarily looking for implementation alone, but for “what should we be doing in the first place?”, which AI can’t help with
- 4mo ago

bstsb 4mo ago

> This conversation was initially just a phone call, but was so powerful that we decided to turn it into a blog and share the audio via YouTube i can tell - it looks like the blog post doesn't really add anything over a direct transcript of the call itself. it's just a bland summary of the really interesting story Dalton told

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
eterm 4mo ago
It's also likely an AI generated blogpost over the original content.

cronelius 4mo ago

So does this mean no Lodash 5?

dheera 4mo ago

I had an open source project (https://github.com/dheera/rosboard https://github.com/dheera/rosboard) that I burned out and didn't really do a good job continue maintaining. * I was burned out from work politics at the same time, and had to prioritize fighting those work politics since that's what was paying me. By the end of each day at that company, I didn't feel like staring at a screen any more * I would get a flurry of poorly-tested pull requests that would break it for some users * I got lots of suggestions of <feature to implement> which weren't well thought out for how to generalize * No actually good engineer stepped up to say "I want to help with this" * There was a commercial alternative that had gotten funding and they were better at marketing

Joel_Mckay 4mo ago

Corollary: if software requires constant revisions it didn't actually cover the initial problem scope, and degenerated into a high-latency service state-machine powered by coders. =3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

mezyt 4mo ago
Makes sense for small tool like ls, and doesn't for things that are actually complex like the python language or sqlite.
- Joel_Mckay 4mo ago
  It is a common misconception that permutation is progress, and popularity is justification for poor design-pattern choices. Spiraling complexity often eventually implodes out-of-band ecosystems sooner or later. =3
jnwatson 4mo ago
The very idea of "let's just write it correct the first time" is itself very much a second system fallacy.
- Joel_Mckay 4mo ago
  Standard project release cycles build to a design specification, clearly defining phases of what is acceptable and when. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level One way to enforce implementation convergence is to define core unit tests before coding even begins. If people just ignored communication, the results are rather predictable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law Building something that doesn't need patched every week is impossible for some. =3

hypfer 4mo ago

I find the term "burnout" in context of FOSS quite infuriating, as it is usually being used to invalidate a real problem. Instead of talking about concrete misbehavior by concrete individuals or institutions, "oh that poor guy is suffering from foss burnout" is thrown in, and instantly, any thought or action that might change anything about the situation is stopped and discarded. It depersonalizes a problem that is _very_ personal. Diffusing responsibility to no one, while at the same time reframing valid logical callouts as emotionally driven nonsense that can be ignored. __ In essence, "FOSS Burnout" is this hybrid between victim blaming and blaming the universe, while in reality it's a real person at that very moment doing something unethical to another human being. We need to stop talking about useless higher-level concepts and start talking about concrete bad behavior that could be instantly stopped. __ If you've read "it diffuses responsibility to no one" and thought "oh, hey! corporate! Asscovering!", then yes. You got it. That's why this trope keeps coming up. It's no grassroots thing. It's engineered to keep the meat grinder running. Nothing else. And the worst part is that it shows up even without corporate involvement, because it seeped into the defaults people apply without thinking.

jlg23 4mo ago
I think you are doing the post injustice by hijacking it. FOSS maintainers can get a burnout even without toxic users - hard deadlines and the understanding that people really rely on your project can do that to you. e.g.: About 25 years I had developed some blogging software in the style of usemod (single executable, data stored in ./data) for coordination of and reporting about protests on throwaway VMs. This initially was a weekend project but spiraled out of control when it made its way through Europe and people called me for setups or features for other actions. My burnout was the result of trying to help grass root organizations while also being politically active myself and having a full time job. The solution was basically what the article says: * invited more maintainers by dumbing down the implementation so that one does not need a black belt in perl to hack on it * created minimal docs * I found hoster in the scene who was competent and willing to do pro bono hosting in exchange for me being available in case of problems (he never called me).
- hypfer 4mo ago

piker 4mo ago

We bumped into this at one point looking to switch our Rust GUI framework and found the best alternatives also suffered a core issue because they both (and almost all Rust GUI frameworks) depended on the same `winit` crate. The `winit` maintainer seemed massively under water. We wrote about it: https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop Honestly, I don't know if open source works outside of a few massive projects any more.

randomuser558 4mo ago

[flagged]

ricardobeat 4mo ago

I remember the creator of Lodash being quite abrasive in the early days, when the library was surfacing as an alternative fork of underscore.js. Life does you a number.

jrpt 4mo ago

Instead of going open source, consider selling licenses with Supported Source (https://supso.org/ https://supso.org/). I made this for the maintainer problem: it's easy to burnout when companies are constantly asking for new features or fixes, while not paying you anything. Why should you work for free so these companies can make more profits? When they start paying you, you're a lot happier about it.

aleph_minus_one 4mo ago

> When people talk about burnout in open source, the conversation often centers on workload, too many issues, too many requests, too much responsibility. Why not simply ignore all this stuff by the maxim "my software - my vision": - If some request does not serve your vision for the software: close it. - If you cannot handle the workload: work less on the program. - If issues exist which you cannot fix very fast: take your time to fix it. Nobody is willing to pay you big money for fixing the issue, so a fix does not seem to be very urgent for the users. - Too much responsibility: if the software was indeed such an important piece of infrastructure, people would pay you big money for you to maintain it.

carlosjobim 4mo ago

Step 1: I'm gonna work for free! Step 2: Oh no! These people are taking advantage of me! Who would have guessed? Honest people want to pay others for their work, so if you explicitly want to work for free, you will attract all types of sleaze balls who are looking for somebody to take advantage of. Step out of the FOSS swamp and step into human dignity.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

impact_sy 4mo ago

Working on open source is truly exhausting; when I couldn't balance my work and personal life, I gave it up. Just a side note: I am an Apache PMC member.