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FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects

165 点作者 parasew大约 3 年前

39 条评论

Lucasoato大约 3 年前
Non-paywall version:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220320083930&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;open-source-developers-burnout-low-pay-internet-2022-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220320083930&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.busin...</a>
FiloSottile大约 3 年前
Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture and of what makes the Internet special: people choose to experiment and share their work, and their work can reach every corner of the world. It has no significant parallel in other industries, it&#x27;s beautiful, and I owe it my career.<p>However, it&#x27;s not a sustainable, fair, or effective foundation for an industry with the responsibility to power modern society. We need the critical role of Open Source maintainer to professionalize. This is most likely to happen through capture by large intermediaries, but I wish to see it happen through the formation of a serious professional role, organized independently or in small firms, like lawyers.<p>This will require changes both from the maintainers [1] (become legible, get a LLC, send real invoices, offer guarantees) and from companies [2] (pay the maintainers, pay them real money, pay for maintenance, and keep paying them).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;words.filippo.io&#x2F;professional-maintainers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;words.filippo.io&#x2F;professional-maintainers&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;words.filippo.io&#x2F;pay-maintainers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;words.filippo.io&#x2F;pay-maintainers&#x2F;</a>
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FooBarWidget大约 3 年前
I&#x27;m an open source maintainer. I have a different take. Yes many projects lack funding, but I&#x27;m hesitant to ask for funding for my projects. Because: what sort of social contract would it imply if people fund me? Should funders be elegible for faster response times? Should their feature requests be implemented with more priority, or must they guaranteed to be implemented? What are the expectations of me? Can I take an extended holiday and go offline for a while? None of this is well-specified.<p>One can argue that funds are donations and thus are free from attached strings, but psychology doesn&#x27;t work that way. Funders will feel entitled to <i>something</i>, but what? You can see this pattern more obviously in Patreon: donors get something in return, such as faster access to content. So even though it&#x27;s a &quot;donation&quot;, people psychologically still experience it as a trade.<p>With Phusion Passenger, I&#x27;ve commercialized a open source project. The contract is clear: if you pay then we both know exactly what to expect from each other.<p>Formalizing the expectations to funders of my other open source projects, effectively turns those projects commercial. But to me, the appeal of my other projects is just that I can code on my own leisure, as a hobby, and give a gift to the community at the same time. It sucks that I have very little time for that because I work on those projects in my free time only, but I&#x27;m hesitant to turn those projects into &quot;work&quot; where I have to give guarantees in return for money.
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clearcoat大约 3 年前
I don&#x27;t think things are nearly as &quot;broken&quot; as these types of alarmist takes make it out to be. Quite the contrary I think FOSS is a model that other industries would do well to adopt.<p>People talk about companies &quot;free riding&quot; on FOSS, but the corollary to that is that this allows an individual developer to be massively more productive, justifying the high salaries we see. To obtain value from just about any open source project, companies need to hire developers, individual developers are in a position to benefit as the gatekeepers to all this &quot;free&quot; value.<p>Everyone is benefiting from this. Free is absolutely essential to making this work. Free is frictionless, free is equalizing. I&#x27;m not choosing between Redux over Mobx based on price, I&#x27;m choosing purely of intrinsic merits and community.<p>It is always easy enough to find problems, but looking over the past couple of decades, I don&#x27;t think you can argue but that things keep getting better.
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RedShift1大约 3 年前
Part of the problem is probably the high amount of churn. In the Javascript world this is absolutely ridiculous, people just can&#x27;t seem to leave things alone and it causes a cascading effect, where one developer makes an API change and suddenly thousands of developers have to deal with a change that typically brings them no benefit. It&#x27;s pretty much a self-inflicted wound.
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ptero大约 3 年前
One of the most important things a FOSS (and not only) engineer can do is learn to say no.<p>And then decide if they do it for fun, or want money. There may be some overlaps, but it should be crystal clear which is the main one. This is <i>100% their choice</i>. Trying to sit on two chairs usually ends in misery.<p>And if they treat it as a hobby (fun) and a company, NASA or someone else needs a fix or a feature ASAP, well, they can always do it themselves. You do it if and when it works for you. The software will likely be better that way, too. My 2c.
PaywallBuster大约 3 年前
makes you wonder,<p>babel say they can&#x27;t live with 300k a year in funding<p>but the 1000s of projects used by 1000s of devs to build 1000s of things barely get 10$ a month or even a year<p>OSS donations should be more fairly distributed, not power law, rock star levels, where 1 project can get more funding than 99% of projects.
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cheschire大约 3 年前
Okay but how many FOSS projects decide to pivot like Ukuu did and just drop the F? If the free is killing you, stop being free. Leave your free repo as is, add a link to your purchase page for future versions.<p>Where’s the problem? People seem hell bent on sticking to core principles until their dying breath, but that’s not healthy.<p>Edit: and before people start laying into me about free as in speech&#x2F;beer, this article is about the latter, not the former.
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tuyiown大约 3 年前
Open source contribution has shifted from bare technological enthusiasm to career and marketing strategy. Users feels that, and started to show more and more entitlement which erodes contribution satisfaction.<p>Open source only works if contribution is of selflessness sharing, as soon as it starts to be an investissement, users have the really legitimate feeling that a weird kind of reciprocity is in play, that tatters confidence and candor.
adriangrigore大约 3 年前
I believe this article actually depicts the insanity of how some people &quot;work&quot; and getting paid for that.<p>&gt; many are quick to press him on what&#x27;s taking so long.<p>&gt; people are shouting at you that you need to work on something<p>This is not normal even in a workplace!<p>Article not necessarily about open source but workplaces in general (not even IT only) only difference is that people in workplaces are getting paid to work in those horrible conditions.<p>Disclaimer: I&#x27;m unemployed, released some open source stuff <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mkws.sh&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mkws.sh&#x2F;</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adi.onl&#x2F;projects.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adi.onl&#x2F;projects.html</a> and surviving as I can rather then being pressed or shouted at I need to work. I value my mental health, thanks!
andrew_大约 3 年前
Clickbait summary article presenting isolated incidents as a forecast of doom.
lifeisstillgood大约 3 年前
I think the &quot;critical software industry&quot; story is fascinating and if research does not already exist in these areas let&#x27;s fund more of it:<p>1. Let&#x27;s baseline the usage and spread first. What code is used, where and by whom. It <i>ought</i> to be possible to get complete pictures of this most large orgs scan their whole estate constantly - but publishing it academically?<p>1.a. A central &quot;phone home&quot; FOSS library that everyone &quot;trusts&quot; will just report the minimum might be a good idea here.<p>2. So if we know what codebase are critical we can then ask are they supported? Are the top five contributors paid in connection with the code base? Lots of ways of finding this about but email or bug requests is most likely winners.<p>3. A move I think is a good idea is to have some form of &quot;Foss Tech Support Mesh&quot; Library X is really useful, so several ISVs announce they support it, understand it etc. Maybe if an ISV account gets a commit accepted they get a badge. This will start to bridge the gap between volunteers and paid positions.<p>while we are at it, what is the proprietary story? I am pretty sure Facebook has funds to keep its codebase updated, but there were MRI Scanner companies that cannot afford to move off windows XP, so there is bound to be a grey area of for profit companies producing code at not much more than subsistence level.
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jameshush大约 3 年前
I like what the React Training guys did with react-router: use the organic traffic from their library fuel their training business.<p>Treat the FOSS project as your lead funnel, then sell a service to those leads.<p>Maybe the service is training, maybe it&#x27;s hosting the project (e.g Wordpress), perhaps it’s just leveraging it to get a lucrative job offer. You need to sell a service though on top of the project itself.
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ungamedplayer大约 3 年前
This has happened since the first foss project.<p>Guess us foss programmers are a bunch of phonies
fartcannon大约 3 年前
The article sums up to &#x27;programming is hard&#x27;, support FOSS devs. Which is hard to find a fault with. The tone is a bit chicken little given that everyone experiences burnout if they have complex jobs that people depend on.<p>In the end, devs probably need to stop being so easy going. Everyone probably needs to be a little more Linus.
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antattack大约 3 年前
Recent security incidents have shown how quick open-source is to address vulnerabilities compared to closed source.<p>It has shown that FOSS does not come w&#x2F;o a cost (open-source does not mean free) and it&#x27;s advantageous and necessary for companies to support FOSS financially.
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shultays大约 3 年前
Almost all devs that care too much about their work burns out eventually. It is just FOSS devs have higher percentage of &quot;caring too much about their work&quot; syndrome, to the point doing it for free.<p>As someone that had similar issues, I would highly suggest everyone to view their job as job. You work on the time you were supposed to, do your best within your capabilities, raise issues when you see them but that is all. Don&#x27;t overwork and try not to worry so much when things are not going the way you want them to be. You can still enjoy your work, just try not to have personal attachment to it.<p>But I guess that is harder for FOSS devs, since the reason they work is being too attached to their projects.
leroman大约 3 年前
OSS developers perceived some value to be gained by them, at some point they seem to be disillusioned by the outcome or don&#x27;t want to pay the cost of further investment beyond what they put (and got back) thus far.<p>This just seems natural and could be followed by one of either<p>1. productise OSS project and start making money from it 2. allow other top maintainer to take the lead 3. work at some BigCo where they can afford to pay full time working on this OSS project, if that makes sense
pabs3大约 3 年前
Do articles like these actually reach anyone who controls spending in companies with spare cash?
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natmaka大约 3 年前
There is at least a project aiming at specifying a protocol (and at developing associated tools) defining how developers can be paid, in order to let users support what they use (even through dependencies) according to their will and without too much of a burden.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openfare.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openfare.dev&#x2F;</a>
chernobogdan大约 3 年前
The situation can be improved by actually contributing instead of asking for features.
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thosakwe大约 3 年前
I maintained a project like this for several years. My genuine advice to anyone considering creating an open-source library: either keep it <i>super</i> small forever, or make it closed-source + charge for licenses.
ricardo81大约 3 年前
I&#x27;ve been meaning to donate more to open source and free services (e.g. archive.org).<p>My last contribution was $20 to libcurl. Apparently it&#x27;s used on billions of devices, if only each of those device owners donated $1!
parasew大约 3 年前
Web3 is said to change this and incentivize development and maintenance of protocols and commons. There is a recent piece at decrypt suggesting that this creates another form of &#x27;community&#x27;. Any opinions?<p>Are Web3 ‘Communities’ Vapid or Authentic? Can we even call this communities? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30741332" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30741332</a>
panny大约 3 年前
Another project recently sabotaged intentionally is node-ipc. I&#x27;m surprised the article didn&#x27;t mention it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2022&#x2F;03&#x2F;sabotage-code-added-to-popular-npm-package-wiped-files-in-russia-and-belarus&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2022&#x2F;03&#x2F;sabot...</a>
raverbashing大约 3 年前
Join (from the part of the developer) idealistic goals, rose tinted glasses, naiveté, with (from the part of the users&#x2F;contributors) lack of respect, lack of project visibility, lack of tact in dealing with OSS maintainers, sometimes lack of technical prowess and too much initiative, and the environment is set for conflict.<p>No wonder most people give up.
jnash大约 3 年前
If you give away your work for free and then complain and act all surprised&#x2F;hurt when nobody pays you in return then <i>you</i> are the problem. Not the people using your work. Accept it and move on. Or make people pay for your work. It&#x27;s that simple.
jchw大约 3 年前
Personally, I don’t really sympathize with the “sabotage” stuff. To me, that’s just immature. Nobody can stop you from quitting out, archiving or deleting repos, etc. but choosing the route of trying to use your influence to try to cause harm is not helpful to anyone and only serves to mess up your reputation (and to a degree, the reputation of all of us maintaining open source projects.)<p>I am yet again still annoyed by how the “problem” here is portrayed. Open source doesn’t need to be “sustainable” for anything in particular. I like open source because I can work on anything I want, and other interested parties can join. I also work for money, and in that case, I don’t get to work on whatever I want to.<p>The problem of internet entitlement is also not unique to open source devs. I’m sure I am not the only one here who has ran internet communities of various sorts, and that, too, can be quite rough. Possibly even worse sometimes.<p>I do sympathize with people who can’t mentally deal with the stress, because after all, people are only human and I think they have only good intentions at heart. But if you are feeling overwhelmed by your successful projects, I think it may be necessary to step back and make sure you’re still in it for the right reasons.<p>Because big tech companies depend on open source, it is often seen as a problem that open source code is mostly unfunded… but frankly, that only matters if you care about the fate of the tech companies more than the open source communities. I say fuck it; Google can fork whatever project if it goes unmaintained. I wouldn’t really want my project to be controlled or influenced by Google, Facebook or Microsoft, but if they get no such influence, exactly what incentive do they have to support the original maintainers instead of forking it for themselves?
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gre大约 3 年前
$1 to read the article that says open source developers are putting the entire internet at risk. hmm
rs999gti大约 3 年前
&gt; it&#x27;s putting the entire internet at risk<p>Mike Monteiro: F*ck You, Pay Me - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U</a>
jdrc大约 3 年前
I wonder if this will be expanded to &#x27;open&#x27; content as well, i.e. people sabotaging their previously free content in order to steer people to paid content
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the_common_man大约 3 年前
What a clickbait. Media is so quick to exaggerate these days.
jgerrish大约 3 年前
I understand my view is different, but I want to build what half of these people built.<p>Traps, noise, abusive environments.<p>Then the clock. I&#x27;ll keep saying it unfortunately :(.
hogrider大约 3 年前
You want to sell software, just sell it, geez.
mynameishere大约 3 年前
And judging from some of these comments, those who haven&#x27;t quit are sounding increasingly like abused wives making excuses.
rurban大约 3 年前
they are talking about npm maintainers only. those yippies really have a hard time because nobody needs that crap, and if so for max 5 years.
xwdv大约 3 年前
If you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen.
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misslibby大约 3 年前
OMG - another one for the annals of ridiculous feminist claims:<p>&quot;The free nature of open source also leads to inequity. Open source is dominated by men, and people who don&#x27;t have as much leisure time or stability might be less likely to contribute to open source when there&#x27;s no compensation involved.&quot;<p>So an article lamenting the horrible lives of FOSS open source developers who work for almost nothing then turns around and blames the same OS developers for driving women out of tech by working for free.<p>Never mind that women tend to be paid by their husbands, so they would have lots of spare time for FOSS development.
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jdrc大约 3 年前
Just put the project out there under the anonymous author natoshi sakamoto.<p>If people want to be rewarded, we have invented a mechanism for that thousands of years ago, it&#x27;s called the market.