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- Hacker News
- 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.
by carlosjobim - 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.by impact_sy
- 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.by ricardobeat
- > 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
by bstsb - It's also likely an AI generated blogpost over the original content.by eterm
- 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
Honestly, I don't know if open source works outside of a few massive projects any more.
by piker - 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.by Devasta
- 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.
- 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.by arikrahman
- Instead of going open source, consider selling licenses with Supported Source (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.by jrpt
- > 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.
- I had an open source project (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
by dheera - 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.by asim
- 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.by reactordev
- 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.
by FinnLobsien - If everyone needs it, everyone can pay for it.
Don’t take shit just because you release software under a permissive license.
by Gud - I feel this is way too fear mongering heavy against developing in Open Source.
I published nearly everything I code on my free time, that's ~100 git repositories. Out of these, ~15 are documented and made generic enough to be used by other people, and out of these ~5 actually have some users, 2 being packaged in mainstream Linux distributions and one even has a CVE.
In total, I have received one AI slop PR. one.
Your mileage may vary, and you may be blessed/cursed with the new redis or xz. But in all likelihood, things will stay more than manageable in terms of critical infrastructure piece.
by kakwa_ - and nobody is willing to pay for it.by subygan
- When I was a kid, we always had New Year's (read: Christmas) decorations (the maximum that wouldn't be out of place in a mostly Muslim country) on a small park in my neighborhood. One year they never appeared, and people were enraged.
The guy the city hired every year had a mob in front of his door. People's letters to the authorities got no answer, so suddenly he apparently became their contact person. I was buying snacks in a nearby shop. I went out when I heard people shouting. They were shouting accusations at a guy who must have just appeared before his door because he was wearing pajamas in that cold weather.
"You Islamists will ruin this country! [0]
Happy with what you did? My children actually cried!"
and so on.
He calmly answered: "This is something I did on my own. This year I got a cancer diagnosis, so I didn't have the motivation. Sorry!"
Him feeling the need to apologize always comes to my mind when I see the toxic comments on their unpaid work that the open source maintainers feel that they need to respond to.
[0]: Well, they did ruin the country. But that's another story.
by egeozcan - And the expectations
- People asking for and always expecting new patterns and colors.
- Raise hell if you miss a few superficial stitches and demand immediate patch work.
- No exit path without complaints. If you find it unsustainable and ask for help with the cost of materials for the *next* batch while the current batch is still out there and works fine, you are blamed for (literal) rug pulling.
by devsda - > Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.
This is why forks happen. It’s very common for a maintainer to decide they’re stepping away from a project or even that they’re not supporting use cases or bug fixes. Then someone starts a fork and, if they are supporting it better than the original maintainer, the traction moves to that project. This happens all the time.
> 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.
I think this is the fallacy at the center of a lot of these debates. In this analogy, people wouldn’t actually around naked. They’d come up with a new solution. They’d switch to sewn or imported clothes. Maybe some other group steps in and learns how to crochet and takes over.
The messier situations occur when one person simultaneously wants to maintain a tight hold on a project and its community, but the maintainers or the community don’t want to endorse any fork attempts. I’ve written before on HN about how some past attempts to form projects have been met with undue hostility for trying to “steal” someone’s pet project. Even open source communities can be hostile to companies forking projects, like all of the complaints that come up about big tech companies profiting off of their own forks of open software (which removes the burden from upstream maintainers). Another examples is when BambuLabs forked PrusaSlicer and there were years of cheap shots at the company for it (though those went away as everyone remembered that Prusa forked another project to make PrusaSlicer).
I really think maintainers who don’t want to do things should come out and say they don’t want to do those things. Let the communities and companies adapt accordingly. The worst state is this in between that happens some times where the maintainers want to retain tight control over the project and community and they try to give an impression of being the everything-to-everyone maintainer when they secretly hate it. It would be so much better for everyone if maintainers would just come out and say things like “I’m tired of fixing security bugs so everyone be warned, as security issues come out I’ll fix them when I get around to it.”
by Aurornis - > Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.
Which you should happily abandon if you get bored.
If people truly need something fixed, they can fix it themselves, or pay someone to get it fixed.
by nitwit005