Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away
Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away
cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/49194514
If only there was a way to fund open source projects so we both could have better software for the world and paid employees..
I think you can guess which government body already do this. Just take a shot.
Big question is: how many of us are funding foss projects?
It isn't difficult, and with how popular some are, it wouldn't be long before the projects could hire one or more full time devs at good rates.
I support a few big projects I use every month through liberapay.
I think the bigger question is how many corporations are supporting foss projects? I'm sure a lot of us contribute a bit here and there if we can and I'm sure it makes a difference - but if some of these corporations, making billions of dollars profit, contribute just a tiny fraction of their wealth it could make a huge difference.
It's the same argument as recycling, turning off lights, walking instead of driving etc. etc. - yes there are 8 billion of us and if we all do it, it will make a difference, but the difference we make is still not significant compared to corporate greed.
We are being gaslit to accept yet another scenario where we socialize the cost and privatize the profit.
Love the enthusiasm, but let's stop casting this as an end-user-only problem. The real issue is, once again, large corporations using and taking advantage of oss while putting ZERO money or work back into oss. It's victim blaming with extra steps, and us blaming each other is exactly what the real culprits want.
If it makes us feel better that we can pay on a regulsr basis for these things, great. But massive oss projects can't thrive on a few of us donating.
Then they would just be paid but exhausted
Liberapay is really nice. I like the payment options they have to minimize the fees, like making 2 years of small "monthly" payments in a single charge to your bank card.
Don’t forget that with money comes expectations though. Managing contributors is not easy.
Big question is: how many of us are funding foss projects?
It isn't difficult, and with how popular some are, it wouldn't be long before the projects could hire one or more full time devs at good rates.
I support a few big projects I use every month through liberapay.
The brain! No the stomach!
Pay for your FOSS! I've paid far more for my FOSS than for any proprietary software.
If you believe in subscriptions, then subscribe only to FOSS software like Bitwarden, Tailscale/Netbird, etc.
Find your favorite FOSS projects on Open Collective and support them there.
And above all else, treat FOSS devs and maintainers with the utmost respect! They are the unsung heros who are building the only alternatives to the corpo-distopian hellscape of proprietary, enshitified, slop software.
Send a message to a dev today, just saying thank you to them for everything, and asking if you can send them a tip if possible.
Folks, let's treat each other lovingly please, FOSS has freed us, give back what you can, and never take it for granted.
To all the devs, maintainers, tinkerers, supporters, FOSS educators, and helpful community members across the FOSS world, thank you so much, and much love. ♥️
I like Projects that provide an IBAN. I don't want to pay 3% to paypal or stripe just to donate to a FOSS project.
I have so many causes on my mind that all need money; some for helping starving children, others for supporting sane politics, GoFundMes for people affected by a warped healthcare system; the request you're making very much makes sense, but it's so hard to put it above so many of the other critical needs for donations, when the image of an open source worker is someone who can, and often does, get paid working for a large company.
But the part about a nice email still applies. I'm not in it for the money, no positive feedback can be discouraging - typically I deal with issues where someone has a problem.
So are closed source developers.
But at least they're paid
Open source should be funded by the tax-payers, or all code should be forcibly open-source (something like AGPL)
Any other models feels like they would create perverse incentives
Also recurring donations feels like a better way than one-time tips
By which country?
Saudi Arabia.
All of them? Maybe an international consortium that pays devs in their home currency.
Each of them.
How do you decide which open source projects are worthy of taxpayer money, and how much does a given project get?
I have a couple projects I’ve put up in GitHub as open source. Would they qualify? Or are you just talking about well known open source projects like Linux?
Same as all other tax funded projects, by some elected people who likely have no idea about the project.
Joking aside, we will see more of this funding due to governments moving to open source software as they tend to want to fund their own stuff.
I'm going to be honest, I have no idea how open source works. I can't imagine maintaining anything more than a tiny library that I can ignore six days of the week.
Also: open source relies on good jobs. You can only do it if you have a well paid low stress job with good hours. Those have been in short supply recently.
I think the free time covid gave, followed by the free time the layoffs gave, and AI have been patching / hiding the fact that the core model of open source is completely unsustainable in its current state.
I have a job like that, but I also have kids, so...
The part that confuses me is: How can multiple people work on overlapping bits of code at the same time, and the Git manager (or whatever you call it) just handles it all without breaking everything?
Roughly equal parts "git is clever" and "once in a while, someone has to take some time to figure it out".
Say the code is split into two files. You and I both make changes, but you're working on file A and I'm in file B. No problem!
Now we both make changes in file A. Sometimes Git can just "figure it out", like if all your changes are in the beginning of the file, and all my changes are at the end.
But sometimes we both change the same section. Git can't figure that part out, so one of us has to sit down and reconcile the changes. Sometimes this is pretty simple, other times...not so much.
Put it all together, and it works out pretty well most of the time.
It’s funny how common this mindset is in the self-hosting community: “If I’m running it on my own hardware, the software should basically be free… maybe I’ll toss a tiny ‘tip’ if I feel generous.”
The logic seems to be that since there’s no ongoing server cost, the developer’s time, skill, and effort must somehow be worth nothing and that we should magically fund the entire project through some hypothetical cloud version that they themselves will never use.
It’s like showing up to a brewery with your own growler and expecting the beer to be free because you didn’t use their glass.
I'm sorry, but I can't agree with this. If the software is free, then it's free. It's up to the authors how they want to license it.
Personally, I write code and publish it in the hopes that it will help someone. If someone comes in and says "there's this bug, fix it!" I will only do so if it will benefit me, or if I feel like it.
The article and discussion here is about open source software which is not free software. Thats where the problem lies it is assumed that open source software has be free.
Freedom in software does not mean free software.
It’s up to the authors how they want to license it.
Plus or minus some amount of piracy, sure
To be fair - this mindset is hardly exclusive to self-hosters. The dotcom era itself kicked off because it was easier to get advertisers to pay for server costs than users.
Careful bro you're making it sound like exploitation has been normalized in the name of 'free software', but actually... Oh wait.
Exactly right.
I read this blog post yesterday and it was insightful.
Seems like we could solve multiple problems in one go here…
I liked the article. It sung to my heart. I've been in this world for a while. Lived through the failure and hyperacalars just taking without giving back.
I don't know what to think. But I'm not happy with where we are and it's nice to hear someone else talking about it.
I'm all for ethical licensing, and defensive licensing, but we'll likely end up with an unmanageable soup of various licenses that everyone is nervous about misinterpreting. We lose efficacy and everyone will just default back to the same handful of licenses we're currently using.
I think unless it was a small number of crystal clear alternative licenses with broadly agreeable terms, we'd get chaos, followed by complacency.
The consequences of what that article proposes is we're gonna be back to this period of history where companies were all using proprietary technology that self-taught devs won't ever learn and that students will only learn if they can afford a school that can use it, in addition to poor developer experience because of maintainer agenda being driven by money rather than community requests.
Fuuuuck that!
A lot of FOSS projects are freemium based which seems viable for larger more complex projects.
In these projects it's common to see the developer get paid for adding features on top of the core version, for a SaaS version, for custom development, or for offering support.
Other projects with a lot of community interest - and a good "community manager" style organizer can attract contributors in the form of pulls, bug testing and reports, and widespread use which generates valuable marketing. These projects only exist because of the labor of love from the whole community.
Same deal with lawyers that go into public interest. It pays super low, compared to corporate and similar that has money to throw at their employees.
I've been using CachyOS and impressed by the array of available software, and it was only in the back of my mind, the thought; "Wow, so much of this is so refined and polished. I wonder who has motive to maintain it?"
Joke's on me, the motive is hardly there - and it's a shitty time for it with Windows announcing that 10 is the last version and that there are no plans for a new one.
I'm glad Valve has a profit motive towards open source right now, but especially in a world where fewer people can donate at random, I really hoped that the model wasn't specifically built to rely just on tip jars.
I don't understand much about the finances of the FOSS world, but do companies like FUTO help at all? I don't even know how FUTO makes money, to be honest.
They're not a company, FUTO is one rich guy.
FUTO is both a company (LLC, to be specific) and a rich guy.
And not to forget: FUTO is evil.
That was my intuition after looking around their site
I know how futa makes money
All of the large scale projects are funded and maintained by enterprises
A lot of larger foss projects do open up a foundation or another legal entity. Mostly due to regulations or dealing with donations. But it's hard to call them enterprises
Should there be OSS?
No. They should change it to CIA.
Hey, it's their problem for choosing to be a developer. That's the worst job ever, with the overtime and shit.
For example, the developer of asus-linux.org who made the kernel contributions for Asus ROG laptops and the accompanying ROG Control Center recently walked away, due to exhaustion.
I couldn't find anything about this on the Asus Linux blog, am I just dumb and looking in the wrong place? I use Asus-linux and didn't know about this :(
Edit: unfortunately it seems that bullshitters who make shit up on the spot have made their way over to Lemmy
Anus Linux, you say?