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- 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
- 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
- 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