Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away
Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away
itsfoss.com
Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away
Comments
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Dark humor becomes a coping mechanism. "Fix it, fork it, f*ck off" becomes the phrase of choice.
oooo, I like that.
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She reviewed academic literature, analyzed 57 community materials, and talked to seven OSS developers directly.
7 developers = entire open source community
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Really good points there.
After seeing one of my team burnout (and I'm feeling it too), the indicators mentioned are real.
Treat them well (and pay them, regularly).
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That article reads like it was written by AI. Feels like a ChatGPT bullet list just with the emojis deleted. They also didn't really say much specific about the FOSS dev burnout, just generic explanation about what burnout is. The article cites a study but then instead of talking about things from it, it just says generic slop about how a burned out FOSS dev could feel.
Edit: I feel like my comment contradicts itself but it's hard to put into words exactly what's wrong with the article but it just reads so poorly.
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It’s definitely click fodder like 99.99999% of today’s content. That’s where we’re at because many years ago we let the pigs into the palace.
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I agree, the article is in the uncanny valley where it just feels off. If it weren’t for AI slop, I would call it clickbait.
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I do not really see that.
The article is short, and myself I like to write longer, more detailed texts. But few people nowadays have the patience to read ten, five, or three pages of text.
Also, I am becoming wary about the trolling / disinformation tactic to qualify something as AI that you do not like. If a piece of text is wrong, it will have logic failures that you can address and point to.
And said that, burn-out is a real problem, I can confirm that. Not only in FOSS software but in other fields of software development, too - but the article also cites real factors which make it worse for open source development. And it is not only a threath for the mental health of individuals, but also for the community.
And the aspect of entitlement of some users is true, too.
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I was commenting about the way its written. I know burnout is real --- even in FOSS we've had the xz backdoor basically caused by overworked maintainer. I was just expecting something less generic. The whole article could have been the first paragraph. The rest was just generic (maybe AI generated) slop without citations (There is your logic error I guess?). I would instead expect the article to refer to the study or refer to other articles or something.
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Being in both sides of the coin, like every volunteer I can tell often that is really tough.
Sometimes a nice email or a post boost will heal moral for a while.
Sometimes a 1€ donation will help a bit for this month hosting fees.
At least that’s what I am trying to do, probably not regularly enough.
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I respect how OpenBSD seems to work. Like "we do this for ourselves, but if you want to use our software, go ahead, we don't mind (or care)".
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Morale. Just fyi sincerely not being snooty :-)
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Are you sure? Because based on the internet armchair developers I see around, open source developers are an inexhaustible source of unending miracles that work for free and are fueled by incoherent, conflicting, entitled demands from 14 year olds.
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open source developers are an inexhaustible source of unending miracles that work for free and are fueled by incoherent, conflicting, entitled demands from 14 year olds.
Ah, I see you're a Bazzite user
e: (No offense to the Bazzite user, I'm sure you're a special little guy and not at all a problem.)
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FOSS works on the premise of an angry engineer, that someone finally got pissed off about a problem enough to write a solution.
This so tracks.
All we need is for the communist government to say we like what you're trying to do. Here's an allowance for expenses!
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The motivational component hits first. Developers lose the ability to push through tasks.
Eh… they lose the motivation to fix issues for free that don’t affect them. Crazy, I know.
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The main problem is, that BigTech abuses the inner fire of Open Source developers. They monetize it, but don't send money to the makers... They send the money to their shareholders.
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That's because FOSS is not paid. Imagine all distros minimum price of 1$
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If that were the case I'd have spent thousands on Linux by now T.T
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Lots of FOSS developers are paid by companies.
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I can think of nothing worse than having your pet project adopted by BigTech and being expected to fix bugs free of charge. I'm not even sure what the solution to that would be other than walking away from it. Thankfully, my biggest project (DF-SHOW) is niche enough to be just a personal project, but a common enough concept (a TUI file manager) that there are plenty of other, more well established, solutions available.
I wrote it for myself, but figured others can benefit from it.
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Time for OnlyFloss
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The FOSS vtuber community is not far from that
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I feel like there is scope for a Patreon type thing that allows you to donate a fixed amount but choose the projects it goes to so it gets split between them. So I can donate €20/month and choose projects A, B, C and G so they all get €5 each
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Liberapay is similar to this, and very well established. Highly recommend checking it out!
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i've used liberapay to support lemmy and now that i know it can do this, i'm going to see if it can do the other project work i also use heavily; thanks for making me aware.
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Great! Thought it’d be wild that no one else thought of this
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This is purely subjective and depends on whom you're talking to. While I've had series of burn out stages with free software development and maintenance, I only distanced myself from writing code but not the community altogether. I also only work for orgs that are run by volunteers not by companies so theres that. If you work on projects that are led by a company, you'll always feel like you're being used because there's no sense of belonging.
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We need a website to highlight what projects need funding and how much. Potemtially partner up with open source social media too so projects can display how much they need for the year
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Is there a good resource for determining how "effective" your donation to any given open source org is? As in how much of it is going to be paid to the actual devs, QA, and other related workers vs higher management?
IIRC that's a major complaint with Mozilla and a lot of other large open source orgs.
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I understand that you want money, but if I created FOSS applications, I would do it for fun.
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So do they. But then the tiny tool they built for fun Kris expanding as they add features until is useful, then really useful. And some eventually become a small, ignored, absolutely critical components in software used by millions. Too small or unsexy to stay any money, but user errors or scammers or AI slop or bugs or feature request lead to enormous volumes of email, comments, forum posts, vitriol, pressure, stress, angst, burnout, depression.
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FLOSS is dumb because it's too good for us. I haven't paid for software in ten years. And I could use this great stuff to build bad stuff.
That's why I refuse to use Linux. It enables a front end of tech stacks for morons to profit from, and sell ideas like state surveillance, AI worker displacement, and other boogey monster tech to audiences gooning for tech to profit from, instead of honoring the purity of open source and what it enables creative young folk to do with it.
FLOSS didn't radicalize me to create, it radicalized me about worker rights.
The open source developers should unionize against the large corporations not paying them. A virtual picket line, and collective bargaining
Related blog post I saw posted yesterday goes into a lot of depth on exactly what you’re talking about.
It does not. It pledges source-available software as a better alternative to FOSS. So it by definition is not about FOSS devs. (I've only read part of the article because I oppose the opinions they share, so maybe it talks about FOSS devs in the part I have not read.)
Lots of open source developers are working for those same companies and getting paid to work on open source code.
I don’t have numbers in front of me, but I think only a slim minority of contributors make money off their work. And those that do make money often can only do so because of the earlier, unpaid, work by others which caused the projects to be valued and widely used