> The economics of open source are fundamentally broken.<p>Open source is not about economics in the first place. If your motives are fundamentally economic, then you are in the wrong place, and you should probably do something else instead - or you will become as frustrated as this author seems to be.<p>> crushed under the weight of entitled users<p>This will only happen if you allow it to happen. Nobody can force you to carry this burden. You do not owe the users anything, and you are free to ignore their gripes.<p>It's not like the users of paid products are any less entitled, or obnoxious about their opinions.
Again, a big misconception that you do Open Source for money and to get rich.<p>Also, the maintainers "burnt" listed in this blog post got pissed off because they can't control another project ("linux"), that doesn't belong to them or was created by them, to go in a specific direction that they would like.
>For everyone else, open source becomes a one-way relationship: all giving, little receiving<p>For me, open source is like making a painting and hanging it on a wall where others can see it. I will never lose a single second of sleep over whether someone else likes it or not.<p>I would never take money for an open source project unless I was prepared to work on it full time. It would give me a sense of responsibility which I don't want.<p>Normalize maintaining your own fork if upstream doesn't agree with you. It takes me 5 minutes per year to rebase some projects where I wanted them to work differently than the maintainers had envisioned.
At Distrust we freely license every line of code we legally can right down to our website and infra repo. We also exclusively do our work with local and self hosted FOSS as well.<p>Our code and docs are always free but they happen on our terms by default. If you want to accelerate development of features that benefit your org, or if you want hands on support, or security advice, or you want your code reviewed quickly, etc, we offer retainer contracts.<p>Able to support 3 employees full time, knock on wood.
“and in return watch your passion get crushed by entitled users who are never satisfied” is absolutely not unique to open source software. Both free but not open tools & services and commercial ones, suffer the same fate. To quote H2G2:<p>> To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.<p>The issue is human nature, from two directions:<p>1. Some people expect the moon on a stick, and will be arseholes if they do not get it.<p>2. Some people are far too giving, to the detriment of their own sanity, and generally realise they are doing this to themselves when it is too late, beyond the point where just stepping back a little bit is sufficient to help the situation.<p>It isn't a new thing either:<p>I had some software out there decades ago, back when shareware was a thing. The free version did everything but left a small watermark, so people could fully test it before paying or just keep using it for free if they didn't care about the watermark. I gave it up because dealing with people simply wasn't worth it, and it wasn't those that paid who were the issue: the real arseholes were those who hadn't. For instance, some of them took “if you don't like it, or find my need to eat/sleep/study makes my free support response too slow for you, maybe use something else?” as a direct personal attack on their rights & freedoms. Given how much more nasty the net is today compared to the relatively nice & naive times back then I hate to think what project maintainers get now. When I gave it up I first stopped taking payments (but kept supporting those that had already paid), then released it Open Source (GPL IIRC) and a couple of people jumped on and tried to make a thing of it, but those projects quickly faded as those people didn't have time and/or couldn't put up with the people either, after which I declared it public domain and let my online copies of it die when I moved ISP soon after.<p>I got out quick, before it became too stressful, but some end up sinking more and more time into things instead.
> Until we fundamentally change how we value<p>"We" value precisely nothing in the plural.<p>You value various objects. I value various objects. It is possible to aggregate the things that you or I value. I submit that saying we value them together is <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division</a>, especially at scale.<p>Which doesn't refute the original post at all. Besides being pleasant, one should contribute to projects where possible. Consider becoming an FSF member, if nothing else.
> The economics of open source are fundamentally broken. Most maintainers never see a dime for their efforts<p>I feel like this statement clearly indicates someone who doesn't "get it."
Rather primitive article. TLDR: dev got into an open source project, "received nothing", was fed up with user complaints, and left => open source is fundamentally broken, "most maintainers never see a dime for their efforts"!<p>Dear author, look up how the OS landscape works, have more realistic expectations, and maybe a better work-life balance.
Water is wet and software is complex.<p>Due to this inherent nature, some support is often needed in order to apply open source successfully.<p>A cognitive dissonance sometimes occurs when open source offers no promise of support to the user yet expects some support in return.
Let’s list 3 reasons people do open source and break down each one.<p>1. As a portfolio to get paid work - great!<p>2. Community cred - very dangerous - a recipe for burnout as described in the article. Maintainers tend to over-extend themselves and there’s no resource allocation signals (no $$$ in other words) to right-size their efforts. Insisting on support contracts is a good mitigation as it allows $ to reflect effort, and difficult customers can be politely overcharged and/or fired.<p>3. For $$$ - futile due to human nature. It’s not rational to pay for something unless you can see the value - eg. why would anyone pay more tax than legally required? Therefore, sponsorships will only be taken up by the tiny minority who take a long enough view to see burnout <i>and</i> want to mitigate that risk for the good of all. But the majority will look at the immediate price of $0, see no future risk, and pay $0. And a small but vocal minority act in ways that burn out the maintainer, destroying their energy to the detriment of everyone. It’s not helped by our financial system, which almost demands that public companies act sociopathically.<p>Marcan could’ve refused to support anyone without a support contract. And to provide signal about who's using too much support resources, limiting how much support you get on your contract is a great way to right-size things with dollars.<p>On their struggles with merging Rust code into the kernel, let’s hope Linus can bang enough heads together. Rust has teething problems but the memory-safety it brings is a boon to security. Seeing Greg Kroah-Hartman weigh in and say the kernel devs have achieved tougher things in the past, I have faith.<p>All is not lost - Marcan has so much love and time and energy invested, if the hostility can be reduced maybe they’ll come back.