[HN Gopher] Sorry everybody, I failed with you
___________________________________________________________________
Sorry everybody, I failed with you
Author : rinesh
Score : 696 points
Date : 2021-06-07 09:17 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| Vaslo wrote:
| This is kind of sad to read, that someone building and
| maintaining a free product feels compelled to over apologize for
| want burning out.
|
| It may just be my cynical view of the world but it just seems
| like more and more people are demanding higher and higher levels
| of service for things that they don't pay much if anything for.
|
| I play a game right now that is in Beta called Dual Universe.
| Some people paid for Kickstarter packages 5-6 years ago for
| around 40 bucks. The game has its areas for improvement to be
| sure, but some of the players are just horrible and abusive to
| the community. I know they paid 40 bucks for a vision some years
| back and maybe DU has overproduced a bit, but the abuse of the 40
| or so staff that is trying to build an amazing game where you can
| build anything you can dream of with voxels is just unrealistic.
| gpanders wrote:
| > It may just be my cynical view of the world but it just seems
| like more and more people are demanding higher and higher
| levels of service for things that they don't pay much if
| anything for.
|
| I know it's cliche on HN to blame everything on Google and
| Facebook, but I really do suspect that the "free to use" model
| pioneered by these companies (among others, of course, but
| these are the biggest) have got everyone used to expecting
| things for free.
| hnthrowaway2 wrote:
| This has probably something to do with big tech companies
| putting out highly polished products for "free" while making
| money in no-so-obvious ways. People have been conditioned to
| expect high quality work for free.
| Vaslo wrote:
| Excellent point - and people forget the side benefits of
| those "free" projects are raking millions into the company.
| [deleted]
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Tangentially related: My personal opinion is that github UI
| should make it bloody obvious by default "this project does not
| provide support." Maybe even with the issue tracker disabled by
| default.
|
| There's a kind of pressure that can come from an unsolicited
| email of a real human explaining how your project is broken for
| them.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Don't use MIT. Use a GPL.
| swat535 wrote:
| How does that exactly address the core issue of the post which
| is OSS maintainers are simply burning out due to a lack of
| support.. ?
| 533474 wrote:
| The support structure is different if you go with the FSF -
| someone can takeover the project and big corps that use the
| code must contribute back. My take is, choose MIT if u want
| to give developers convenience (and u don't care if you r
| flooded with request and lack of attribution). Or choose GPL
| and the FSF if you care about legacy, organized support
| structure and end-user value. I even think dual license GPL
| version / paid version is a better choice than just releasing
| under MIT...I feel sorry but this story keeps repeating
| itself, we've been at it for decades and people are just
| realizing that open source is pointless without organized
| support groups or monetisation plan that respects developers
| and users freedoms
| christophergs wrote:
| At my last gig I got budget to bring in the maintainer of an
| open-source testing library we using for some really important
| stuff.
|
| We paid him $1500 for a couple of days consulting. He showed us
| how to fix a couple of tricky bugs and gave a talk to the eng
| team. At this point we've more than recouped the investment.
|
| He was psyched to see his tool being used and I feel the visit
| contributed to him continuing to maintain the project.
|
| After those two days we also tried to hire him (he declined
| because he was making bank elsewhere). But those two days were
| _also_ the best interview process ever because we did hours of
| pairing in non-interview mode.
|
| If you're a senior dev at a tech company with money you can
| _easily_ make this kind of thing happen and it 's such a win-win
| elric wrote:
| About a decade ago, Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo fame set up
| fosstithe.org, which was about encouraging companies to set
| aside some percentage of your profit to donate to FOSS
| projects. Alas, the website no longer seems to exist. I still
| think it's a great idea, and every year I donate 5% of my
| profits to FOSS projects I like.
|
| Convincing corporates to do the same is a little trickier. They
| want things like invoices, which can be hard for many smaller
| FOSS projects. Not every FOSS developer has a consulting gig.
| Not sure how to help out those developers, except by using
| their software and being appreciative, I guess.
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| _Not every FOSS developer has a consulting gig._
|
| But they could! It's as easy as saying "I can consult on
| $topic, please contact me to discuss details."
|
| Then you charge money and do the work.
| elric wrote:
| It's probably not that clear cut. Maybe they have a full
| time job. Maybe their employer has An Opinion regarding
| side gigs. Maybe they live somewhere where a side gig comes
| with a lot of paperwork/taxes so it isn't worth the hassle.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| This is exactly how it's done. People are willing to pay for
| modifications and consulting. The only danger here is turning
| into Oracle where little effort is put towards usability in
| order to protect your consulting revenue stream. Just build
| great tools and libraries and people will come to you for help.
| elboru wrote:
| Wow, that never occurred to me, that's a win-win situation for
| everyone involved! The maintainer gets recognition and payment
| for his work, the company learns and has its questions
| answered. I'll keep that in mind in my future projects, thanks.
| superasn wrote:
| I don't say for this project but if you own a popular open-source
| project which is used by many companies it does make sense to
| think off it as your main business sometimes. I mean not just
| donate to me or follow me on patreon business, an actual business
| business.
|
| I think once you start making a lot of money from your project
| and can do it full-time it _may_ help to bring some enthusiasm
| back (if it doesn 't, well you can always leave the project too).
|
| For example, take Laravel. The guy created Spark and Forge and it
| was an instant hit for those who love his software. I think
| fontawesome, tailwind, sidekiq, browserless are more such
| successful examples.
|
| Some means of montesing OSS projects I've seen include:
|
| - Approach big companies to sponsors your project. Often times
| big and funded companies will love a spot on your readme for a
| monthly subscription (but they need a little nudge).
|
| - Offer a hosted version (like browserless)
|
| - Offer specialized subscription courses (like Vue Mastery)
|
| - Offer premium features (like Sidekiq)
|
| - Use it to drive traffic to your own commercial business (like
| jwt.io is for auth0)
| muyuu wrote:
| monetising OSS is not as trivial as starting all these extra
| fronts and just hope it somehow pays off, people need to
| survive in the meantime
|
| success in terms of usage doesn't necessarily lead to success
| in these ancillary efforts - take for instance docz which is
| the project in question, its very main selling point is that
| it's simple enough you don't need support and it generates
| output without dependencies that is trivial to package or serve
| yourself
| chii wrote:
| > very main selling point is that it's simple enough you
| don't need support
|
| and yet there's mention of lots of people pressuring him to
| add new features or fix issues.
|
| So i say, OSS developers should actually have a standard set
| of ultimatums for all projects ; namely, pay up, or don't get
| any support that the developer doesn't feel like providing.
| muyuu wrote:
| one-off changes don't make for a revenue stream, you'll
| find that people are prepared to ask for features a lot
| more often than they'd pay for them
|
| also, tenuous conditions are inherent to that model -
| typically you have a couple people paying a few dollars and
| asking for the moon every other day, and you already said
| "yes"
|
| doing that sort of thing solo is certainly not for
| everybody, the overlap of people good at producing software
| and good at customer management + PR is extremely slim
| softwaredoug wrote:
| > big companies are using the project and need a lot of things as
| well from it in order to keep their projects healthy, but in most
| of the cases this is a talk in just one way.
|
| This is everything with what's wrong with open source. Many
| companies treat open source as something they have a right to
| consume and no obligation to support financially or with dev
| time. Some poor schlub is on the other end working their butt off
| and feeling guilty, while the company realizes all the value...
| zx2391 wrote:
| Yes, I've seen corporate presentations on that matter, which
| basically focused on the zero-cost aspect. Well, you get what
| you pay for, I guess.
| stkdump wrote:
| Well, often you get way more than you pay for, and it would
| be stupid not to acknowledge that. For example almost all
| Linux users never pay for nor support Kernel development in
| any way or form. And I think the people who _do_ the
| development and create the value for the rest of us mostly
| are ok with that.
|
| That doesn't negate the fact that when you rely on open
| source software for your business and need more than just
| read access to the repo it would be polite to wise up on the
| maintainership status of the project and ask if you can
| contribute back in any form.
| antirez wrote:
| As somebody with experience in developing many OSS projects of
| different sizes (Redis, Hping, Jim Tcl, Visitors web analyzer,
| and many additional smaller ones), I think that the solution is
| simpler than it appears: just do what you want. When you are
| inside the flames of a successful open source project, you may
| think that the solution space is binary: don't do anything, or do
| everything people are demanding from you. Instead you can just
| keep doing what you want, cherry picking what issues you want to
| address, reply to, what features you want to add, and so forth.
| Just give you a fixed amount of time to spend on the project (in
| my case most of the time it was "all the time I've in a day, but
| up to 6/8 max", but it can be even just 10 minutes every day),
| and in this time do the things you like to do and ignore all the
| others. A few issues/PRs will be perfectly aligned to what you
| feel is right and you'll enjoy taking care of them. Others will
| not, and who cares?
|
| And anyway, doing things this way I was able to write a database
| that beaten, in the market, products developed with hundreds of
| developers while I was alone, so there must be some merit in what
| the original author feels is worth investing into. So, just do
| what you want, but:
|
| 1. Don't fall in the trap of thinking that who asks you for
| things is doing some kind of mistake or abuse just because (for
| example) they are not paying you. Nope, they are fine asking for
| things, you are fine to ignore the requests.
|
| 2. Don't fall in the trap that you are not accountable about the
| quality of the software just because it's free software: do only
| want you want, but ship finished work that is reasonably well
| written and well documented. To do what you want, at your own
| peace and according to your own personal expectation has NOTHING
| to do with the quality of your work. Software fails, but one
| thing is to ship terrible stuff just because "Hey it's free",
| another thing is to do things the way you want, but with love.
|
| 3. When people attack you, reply gently saying what you think.
| Don't get trapped into fights, don't feed the troll, remember
| that many criticizing you, if you are stealing money from the
| table providing something free, have specific agendas (but
| sometimes they are just assholes), and their goal is to mount a
| big case. Stop them replying carefully and without anger, then
| let the discussion end, or continue without you.
|
| 4. Make good friends in the process. They'll help you immensely
| when there are hard times. Remember: the smartest people 99% of
| the times have a big hearth and are the most friendly.
| dimgl wrote:
| This is great advice and it's what I've done with my open
| source projects as well. The point of open source is that it's
| just that: it's open and free. People can try demanding things
| from you, but you don't work for them. So they can fork it and
| make changes or get lost.
|
| I think there's something about seeing a line item on a UI that
| really breaks people's brains. This is why sometimes having a
| conversation on Slack can feel different than Zoom or even in
| person; there's a sort of permanence on these mediums that
| don't exist in person to person interactions. I think it's
| similar with GitHub issues. Seeing an issue and getting a
| notification for it can make repo owners feel inclined to
| answer.
|
| Just don't answer. You don't owe anyone anything.
| arp242 wrote:
| Over the last year I've been very explicit about this in issues
| and such that people report (especially feature requests, but
| also bugs I don't really care about): "Thanks! Sounds good;
| keep in mind this is a spare time project I wrote for my own
| reasons, I'm happy working to solve other people's problems too
| if it improves the project, but I work on it when I feel like
| it, which may be next week, next year, or never. In the
| meanwhile, I'm happy to review and merge patches".
|
| Often it's closer to next week than never, but sometimes it's
| not. This sets expectations, and best of all, it just _feels_
| very liberating saying it out loud. Some of the stress I had in
| the past (not just OSS work, also other volunteer work) is
| having the feeling I was obligated to do stuff; for me
| personally anyway, this relieves much of it.
|
| Thus far, everyone has understood this too; that it's delivered
| in a friend/positive rather than snappy way (as I've sometimes
| seen) probably helps. Granted, I haven't maintained some truly
| "large" projects since I started doing this, but there are a
| few of non-trivial size with some amount of issues.
|
| Personally, I think this is better than outright ignoring, at
| least for me personally (everyone is different). I will feel
| guilty if I ignore people, and even a reply like the above
| removes that guilt because I've clearly communicated
| expectations.
|
| Aside: if you say "I'm happy to merge patches" then you should
| really do your best to actually do so or not say it at all IMHO
| (which is also fine). Of course life happens and it's not a
| hard promise, but you're essentially asking people to volunteer
| their spare time to write code, and ignoring their code (and
| time) is not great. I've seen people solicit patches (sometimes
| very large non-trivial ones), people write them and then ...
| _crickets_. Not even a "this patch won't do", just ...
| nothing.
|
| Unsolicited patches is a bit different, I do try and respond as
| best/quickly as I can out of respect for people's time, but I
| didn't promise anything beforehand so I don't feel the
| obligation, and especially for difficult patches I sometimes
| leave a similar message as above.
| wrren wrote:
| I feel sympathy for the maintainer here, but at the same time I
| feel as though they've cultivated a very unhealthy relationship
| with the users of this project. If the users aren't paying you,
| you really don't owe them anything and you certainly don't need
| to apologise for prioritizing your own mental health and
| happiness over users' demands.
|
| It's a different story if you're being paid to do some work, then
| you hold a degree of responsibility, demarcated by contract, for
| the thing you're working on. In the case of open source, however,
| that's not the case and it's absolutely your right to minimise or
| drop your support for a project at any time.
| steelframe wrote:
| For every single one of my Open Source projects, having an exit
| strategy has played a central part. This included setting clear
| expectations and boundaries around what the scope of the project
| is, defining "feature complete" to be below what some users are
| happy with, and making sure occasional contributors can fix the
| critical bugs. Millions of people are currently using what I've
| built, and I spend zero time on those projects any more. Life's
| too short to be a slave to anything.
| sombremesa wrote:
| Reminds me of a phenomenon I see again and again in small
| business: owners struggling to keep up with demand and
| sacrificing their sanity in the process.
|
| The correct answer there is to raise prices.
|
| Another thing that happens a lot is that lower prices bring in
| worse customers who are more demanding and less respectful of
| your time.
| makecheck wrote:
| Even when open source is "attributed", that is usually done in
| the laziest and bare-minimum way possible (like being buried
| multiple levels deep in some "Acknowledgements" item, that simply
| displays a 45 page text document with unzoomable and unsearchable
| text that casually lists the dozens of open source libraries
| used).
|
| Unfortunately there are a _lot_ of people who really will do the
| bare minimum and take everything they possibly can from projects
| and give absolutely nothing back.
| dzink wrote:
| To reduce burnout among open source developers GitHub could offer
| a couple of additional features:
|
| 1. Repo endorsements by companies or brands that use it.
|
| 2. Bounty option on feature requests - aka increase the priority
| on a request by paying a bounty on it of sorts - attracting more
| contributors to projects in demand.
| danbmil99 wrote:
| This may be an obvious point but how can you say you failed when
| due to the fact that it's open source, anybody could check out
| the code and start supporting it?
| [deleted]
| vbezhenar wrote:
| It's a common thing that a person imagines that he's
| responsible for something, can't keep up with it and finally
| feels himself failed, despite the fact that he wasn't really
| responsible in the first place. But it's still a source of
| misery and disappointment. I guess, it takes some time to
| understand what's the real responsibilities are and what's the
| imaginary responsibilities are. I agree that putting some code
| public with open source license does not bind author to any
| kind of responsibility and any continued work from him is just
| a charity to the world which he can stop providing at any time.
| If someone needs more guarantees, he can pay author or any
| other person (if code is open source) to provide those
| guarantees.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Humility and a strong sense of responsibility.
|
| And perhaps a little bit of false guilt, because they were
| overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work. Perhaps they didn't
| estimate how time consuming it is to do this and feel guilty
| about that.
| progx wrote:
| Most projects life because of huge support of few people.
| Pareto principle: 20% doing 80% of the work. And in my opinion
| on the most projects doing less then 10% more than 90% of the
| work.
|
| I have an OS project too, people want 1000 things, you can say
| "ok, make a PR and it will be integrated", many make a good PR,
| but that's it. Normally they do not make any support, they made
| feature they need, and they are gone when it is implemented.
| (not all, but most people)
|
| And when issues come up, because of the new feature, you can
| try to contact the creator, sometimes they help, sometimes not.
| But to contact them is work too.
|
| I am so happy that i found a "community manager" (after years
| and many try it), who does all the non-programming stuff and
| keep the project alive, cause my time is spare too.
| arkitaip wrote:
| How about the insane entitlement that many devs have when it
| comes to open source? Getting bombarded with requests and angry
| emails from people who demand free support and bug fixes can
| burn anyone out.
|
| I think Github can be a positive force for change here.
| Redesign the UI to encourage donations, to encourage people to
| get involved in project work, to write less hostile issues,
| etc. If devs and designers can weaponize UI to create
| addiction, anxiety and FOMO, maybe we can use the same tools
| for good for once.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| This! Several of my github repos now have a disclaimer that
| says "if this doesn't work, don't send me insulting emails"
|
| It's especially bad if a big company links to you from their
| tutorial or in their add-on catalogue because then some of
| their customers will feel like your open source is part of
| the commercial offering that they bought. So then you're
| forced to do open source support for entitled aholes and
| someone else is cashing in on your work.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > So then you're forced to do open source support for
| entitled aholes
|
| I had no opportunity to do it so far, but what is wrong
| with simply banning such people and closing tickets (with
| note that this issue is closed for rude behavior, not
| WONTFIXed)?
|
| I would certainly not feel forced to support them.
| bawolff wrote:
| I wonder if this is a back-firing of the push for people to
| be "nice" and "professional".
|
| Open source maintainers used to have the sterotype of being
| rather harsh, and basically telling people to f off if they
| had stupid questions, didn't RTFM or didn't follow cultural
| norms. And dont get me wrong, there's a lot wrong with that,
| but maybe it was also that way for a reason.
| planb wrote:
| You can be harsh in a nice and professional way though.
| kjs3 wrote:
| I can't second this enough, and it's the other side of
| that whole "put your code on Github and use it as a
| resume". If I'm looking to hire someone, and I look at
| their Github repository and it's full of nasty,
| unprofessional responses to PRs and such, it's a pretty
| safe bet I don't need that attitude on my team.
| [deleted]
| mncharity wrote:
| In the 1990s, the perl and python communities both had to
| cope with an endless stream of novice confusion. One grew
| community norms which included recreational disparagement.
| The other, in part in reaction, was explicit and firm: if
| you can't be polite and professional just now, your
| contribution to the community can wait. The contrast
| between the two cultures was very dramatic.
| watwut wrote:
| Nice professional people have large backlogs ignored for
| years, say no to requests or delay work. Otherwise said,
| being nice and professional does not imply you will
| immediately implement every feature request or bug report.
| It does not imply you will not block/mute abusive people.
| beckingz wrote:
| Being nice and professional just means smiling as you get
| a dumb request and being open about your intent to
| prioritize the request alongside everything else.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Agree. I'm active in some communities that are unfriendly
| if not outright hostile towards newcomers.
|
| I'm sure they lose a good amount of potential contributers
| that way. But the few newcomers that remain are highly
| motivated.
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| Now that I think of it, that's also my experience. If I
| really need a project to do whatever (and can't implement
| the feature myself), I shut up, let the horrible attitude
| wash over me and put hours of effort into testing and
| providing helpful information, and maintainers _usually_
| mellow out eventually. If I hadn 't done all of that
| work, the maintainer would have had to do it. Sure,
| they're much better equipped to do it and can probably do
| it in a quarter of the time it takes me, but multiplied
| by fifty tickets... Oof.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I don't think some UI tweaks are going to fix this sense of
| entitlement.
|
| Modern devs in those ecosystems that use a lot of
| dependencies see their jobs as plugging together lumps of
| other people's code. There's a very strong "don't re-invent
| the wheel" vibe - the first thing any dev does when presented
| with a problem is look for an existing code base that solves
| it.
|
| This means that people have their entire jobs on the line
| relying on other people's code. If the OS library that you
| found has a bug in it, and your project depends on that
| library, and your manager is shouting at you to get it fixed,
| then you're having a bad day. In an ideal world, "fixing the
| bug" would mean diving deep into the library code, finding
| and fixing the bug, and submitting a PR to the maintainer.
| But this can be beyond the dev's abilities, especially when
| the only kind of coding work they're done is plumbing
| together dependencies. So they only have two options: try and
| get the maintainer to fix the bug, or switch dependencies
| (which might take longer, and possibly have other bugs).
|
| There's a real sense of "I'm using your library, giving you
| cred, so you need to fix it for my use-case" that I've seen.
| It doesn't help that dependencies are free (as in beer) -
| it's a well-known truth that people don't respect things that
| are free.
|
| I think for all of this to change, we need to scale back the
| dependence on dependencies, audit dependencies properly for
| security and sustainability issues, and pay the maintainer.
| If there's any change needed in Github, it's that Github
| needs to start charging a fee for every download.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Agreed, I would never write such a message. I have zero
| responsibility toward the users of my open source code, and my
| license does reflect that fact, unless they pay me.
|
| You're not satisfied with my open source work? Fork and fix it.
| You can't fix it? Hire somebody who can. You don't have the
| money to hire somebody who can? Then find other users, do a
| fundraiser and hire somebody who can fix the code.
|
| This culture of entitlement has gone way too far. Some
| companies make billions out of some open source project yet
| never contribute a cent or a man hour back yet you still find
| engineers from these companies complaining on github issues
| that bugs aren't resolved quickly enough.
|
| I say this, this might be the golden age of open source now but
| it's not going to last. Users have become too petty and
| entitled.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| What bugged me the most was how unwilling users were to dive
| into code to make small edits. They'd rather spend 3X the
| time filing issues, writing emails, and tweeting about it.
| And if you tell them, "maybe you should just not use this,"
| then you're seen as unreasonable.
|
| The entitlement drove me out. The market is more about
| chasing shiny things than using things that are the best fit.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| The pattern is familiar:
|
| * open source project
|
| * success
|
| * no monetary reward, maybe just cost
|
| * burnout
|
| * project abandoned
|
| This is why I don't try to make any open source projects - what's
| the gain?
|
| I'd only do it if it paid money. If people aren't willing to pay
| then I'm not willing to work.
| inbx0 wrote:
| I think it's worth noting that it doesn't seem like the author
| here sees it quite the same way as you do. Burnout is obviously
| bad, but it also seems to me that he genuinely enjoys writing
| open source software, so I guess that enjoyment (plus some
| "opportunities" he got) is the gain.
| imhoguy wrote:
| This is quite similar situation when many idealist engineers
| grow, often unwillingly, into politics, management or C*O
| level - someday the coding fun ends and the not so fun
| business work takes over.
| Igelau wrote:
| This is an Anti-Pattern in OSS. Start a project to build
| something you want/need. Update it as you want/need more
| things, but don't build other people's businesses for them.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> build something you want /need ... don't build other
| people's businesses for them._
|
| Yep. Scratch _your_ itch. If someone else wants different
| features then let them add them or compensate you for your
| effort, unless of course working on those changes is
| interesting for you or would help scratch your itches. If you
| do it for the "interesting/fun" reason make damn sure the
| requester knows that if that interest/fun stops then free
| work on the feature will stop and it might get removed
| completely if not maintaining it becomes a security problem
| or other burden.
|
| "But what about the community?!" you hear them cry. Fuck 'em.
| Or at least suggest they do something for the community they
| care so much about by putting in a bit of effort in to
| maintain it, maybe forking your project to do so while you
| deprecate the feature and work on things that are interesting
| or useful to you, or paying you to work on the bits they
| particularly want and you don't. Your mental health should be
| much higher up your priority list than doing work to help
| people who (call me cynical, but...) probably wouldn't do the
| same in reverse.
| stevoski wrote:
| Add to the pattern:
|
| * Write to high profile companies that use your OSS work asking
| them to contribute. * Get a very polite and convoluted "no" in
| response.
| Fordec wrote:
| Yep, I've stopped owning Open Source projects. All projects are
| for me now, and I reap the minuscule rewards from being all the
| only benefactor of the effort. But at least it's not a net
| negative burden of time sink, support, server costs, hosting,
| burnout, etc.
| 3princip wrote:
| If your primary motivation is short-term monetary gain then
| you're right, it doesn't sound like a rational undertaking.
|
| I can think of two reasons to work on open source. Altruism,
| you want to give back to the community without expecting a
| monetary gain in return. Investment in skills, if you want to
| differentiate yourself from peers, you'll have something to
| talk about to potential employers. It is a great opportunity to
| learn and become a better software engineer.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Also, some of the best software could be stuff that nobody
| can actually afford.
| progx wrote:
| You don't have to do OS, you can if you want.
|
| It could be fun.
|
| The hope to find similar people who really want to work on the
| project too and split the workload for everybody.
|
| Giving something back: i use so many OS tools, so i give back a
| tool that a made to solve a problem for me, hopefully it could
| solve problems for others.
|
| On the other side, you don't have to maintain an OS project,
| you can publish it "as is".
|
| I know people that publish basic OS software and sell their
| time to extend the project to the needs of customers. (so it
| could be a business model)
|
| Burnout is not a OS specific problem, it is something that
| anybody has to learn and find his own limits. I hope the post
| author learned how to deal with it in the last year.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I'd only do it if it paid money. If people aren't willing to
| pay then I'm not willing to work.
|
| Would a form of UBI, together with 20 or 30 hours work week
| work for you? I seriously wonder what the state of open-source
| hardware and software would be if society would focus on
| redistributing automation gains more.
| rvz wrote:
| > Would a form of UBI, together with 20 or 30 hours work week
| work for you?
|
| Every developer is different, but ideally they would do it
| full time if it pays significantly more than their current
| job.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| I'm exactly the same - I choose not to open source things
| because it's more hassle than it's worth.
|
| Also as someone who works in a Microsoft language, I get really
| tired of silly immature Go/PHP/Python developers who seem to
| get off on hating on Microsoft and have this strange desire to
| preach that opinion everywhere.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| First, no need to apologize!
|
| Then, I don't think this is a specific problem with open source.
| My view. The lack of knowledge about how to delegate work is a
| real problem. I mean, I worked with junior developers on the edge
| of breaking down while being on same team writing pointless games
| to pass time.
|
| I think this is more of an issue with young people enjoying the
| heights of the Dunning Kruger Effect.
| kibbleble wrote:
| Has anyone ever modded Bethesda games? And by modding I don't
| mean "downloading plugins" but making those plugins and doing
| game development for free?
|
| Same sh*t. Same drama and human nature. So much drama about IP
| and copyright and abandoned mods. Point out that the source code
| is open. "Feel free to implement something yourself, the
| documentation is available." Crickets.
| headmelted wrote:
| I can empathise with the author completely here. This exact thing
| happened to me in the last couple of years (albeit with a _much_
| smaller user base than in this case).
|
| I maintained a set of Visual Studio Code builds for the Raspberry
| Pi and for Chromebooks.
|
| Unfortunately life happens to us all, and due to similar reasons
| of mental health (and a few family matters that couldn't wait) I
| fell well behind on responding to issues on GitHub and merging
| patches.
|
| It's hard to know you're letting people down, especially when it
| was something you put out there for them that they've come to
| depend on.
|
| In my case my project eventually became obsolete due to a
| combination of direct vendor support from Microsoft for ARM, and
| because of Linux for Chromebooks.
|
| In the end I wasn't upset to move on from the project, I was just
| relieved that I was able to stop and still point the users back
| to something officially supported so they wouldn't be abandoned.
|
| I'm glad Pedro's doing better, but I really hope for his sake
| he's returning to work on this because he wants to and not out of
| a sense of obligation - his health is way more important than a
| few feature requests. It looks like a great project, he should be
| rightly proud of his work here.
| rvz wrote:
| > ...People want a lot of things from you and your project, big
| companies are using the project and need a lot of things as well
| from it in order to keep their projects healthy, but in most of
| the cases this is a talk in just one way. There are more people
| interest in have things from you, than help! And this crashed me
|
| If they are all users of your open source software and are
| begging for features for free, ignore them and focus on yourself.
| This is why many developers always prioritise paid support or
| sponsors and the choice of license is also very important.
|
| It's really simple, either the user does the work and contributes
| the fixes for free (depending on the license) or the user pays
| for the maintainer to prioritise the work at a cost.
|
| Either way, I will never do free open source work on someone
| else's deadline and will always do it in my own time. Unless
| you're willing to pay me to add a feature or support.
| dgb23 wrote:
| We don't know how much pay/sponsorship was the issue here. It
| seems to me that the maintainer was simply overworked and slept
| very, very little.
|
| This is bearable for a certain amount of time but after that
| one really has to look after themselves, regardless of
| financial interests or a crash is inevitable.
| chii wrote:
| > overworked and slept very, very little
|
| i would say overwork and no/low pay are the same thing.
|
| If you have a large amount of work being demanded of you by
| users/companies, then it's time to charge money for the time
| that would've taken. The charge should be big enough to
| replace your day job. If it's not, then don't do it, except
| for any fun bits that you would've already done.
| rvz wrote:
| True, burnout is inevitable with a single developer. That's
| why paid support or sponsorship is used to hire more
| developers / contributors to reduce the risk of the project
| stagnating due to one developer burning out.
|
| Either way, no developer wants to do free work on someone
| else's deadline and it is always done in their own time,
| unless they want to pay for the effort.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| First, no need to apologize!
|
| Then, I don't think this is a specific problem with open source.
| My view. The lack of knowledge about how to delegate work is a
| real problem. I mean, I worked with junior developers on the edge
| of breaking down while being on same team writing pointless games
| to pass time.
| zx2391 wrote:
| I maintain OS projects and my stance is simple: I'll fix thing,
| that are broken - mostly because I want things to work. I won't
| add new features for you, unless I really see the appeal. If you
| come up with a PR, nice! I'll take the time to review, but even
| for that there is no guarantee.
|
| The same limits I impose on the community I fully expect to
| follow when working with any OS project. Period.
|
| Remember, in that "other world", we would have to pay for each
| and every little proprietary piece of sh* code. The "new world"
| will not be built by profit-maximizing value-extractors, and if
| you think it will, then I wish you a happy burnout.
|
| Also remember, that for millions of people the notion of giving
| away something valuable for free is totally absent. They
| literally fail to comprehend. They are happy to sell the same
| thing many times over.
|
| In my book, OS software developers are living in the future,
| today and a lot of the friction comes from a world, that just
| works by a totally different set of rules.
| contriban wrote:
| Even PRs often take a long time to review and get to a
| reasonable point, especially but not only from new
| contributors. Some are so bad I just have to close them even if
| I want the feature, and some I waste hours on that I could have
| spent just writing it myself. Rarely I get PRs that I can merge
| without non-nitpick reviews.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| > Remember, in that "other world", we would have to pay for
| each and every little proprietary piece of sh* code. The "new
| world" will not be built by profit-maximizing value-extractors,
| and if you think it will, then I wish you a happy burnout.
|
| Yeah, I think there are a couple of problems with Open Source
| as it is done today.
|
| One is that people are making things that are useful to profit-
| maximizing value-extractors. I don't know how much is because
| their "itch" is aligned with them, or because that's the way to
| get a top project on GitHub and make a name for yourself. But
| seriously: stop making things that are useful to profit-
| maximizing value extractors. Make software that is useless[1].
|
| The second is that we really have no kind of license to
| discourage the use of useful software by profit-maximizing
| value-extractors. In large part, this is, IMO, because FLOSS
| licenses have prioritized the rights of the user (who may be a
| profit-maximizing value-extractor) over those of the author or
| the community. It is also in part because licenses seem to be
| the wrong kind of tool for controlling how our software is
| used. CopyFarleft and Ethical Source licenses are trying to
| tackle this, but not very successfully, I think.
|
| [1]: https://ando.life/journal/the-useless-tree
| seumars wrote:
| >I'll fix things that are broken - mostly because I want things
| to work. I won't add new features for you, unless I really see
| the appeal. If you come up with a PR, nice! I'll take the time
| to review, but even for that there is no guarantee. To some
| this may sound like it ruins the spirit of open-sourc but I
| totally support this. I should make this quote my default
| readme.
| enumjorge wrote:
| I don't know why paying for someone's time and effort is a bad
| thing. If anything, undervalued/unpaid labor seems a little
| dystopian, especially when some large companies are getting
| value out of someone's volunteer work without giving anything
| back.
|
| I get the value of free software, but lately it feels like OS
| went from geeks sharing code because we value knowledge, to
| people who use the software making demands on someone else's
| personal time.
| CarVac wrote:
| I personally think it's most healthy to develop open-source
| software when you are the target user.
|
| This way incentives align so that there's more intrinsic
| motivation to work on the software.
| progx wrote:
| But what did you change, so that you have now time for the
| project?
| imhoguy wrote:
| Recharged? With burnout one may have abundance of time on the
| clock, but no mental time for anything.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| That's the dark side of open source. Companies think these
| projects grow on trees and they use them without paying anything.
| We need law changes to ensure that open source can be sustainable
| and companies pay the fair share of revenue they make by using
| it.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| How do you estimate a share? What's the share of libc in Google
| business? What's the share of openssl? What's the share of
| ncurses?
| progx wrote:
| libc used in Android. openssl -> view boringSSL - BoringSSL
| is a fork of OpenSSL that is designed to meet Google's needs
|
| Nobody says that one company has to support every project and
| google supports many open source projects.
| ivanbakel wrote:
| But how would you estimate the contribution that libc has
| to Android? Is libc entitled to 10% of Android's revenue?
| 20%? 100%, since it is a vital component? This is what the
| GP was asking.
| progx wrote:
| Only google can answer that. But i think we can not say
| one lib make x%, it are all the libs and tools that are
| necessary. We don't now what e.g. google search uses
| under the hood, but all are needed so google can make
| only $1.
| muyuu wrote:
| I was onboard until you suggested law changes
| ulzeraj wrote:
| > We need law changes to ensure that open source can be
| sustainable and companies pay the fair share of revenue they
| make by using it.
|
| We don't need more laws. There is something called a License
| Agreement.
|
| However if you publish your stuff on GPL and other permissive
| licenses you can't really complain about Amazon, Google and
| Microsoft making millions on your code while you beg for
| donations on your Github page.
| fsflover wrote:
| > We don't need more laws. There is something called a
| License Agreement.
|
| We just need UBI.
| nlitened wrote:
| How would UBI help software developers pay for their
| libraries? They are already among the most highly paid
| professionals.
| fsflover wrote:
| People who enjoy doing open-source will be able to
| dedicate more time to their (very useful) hobby.
| ttt0 wrote:
| Why UBI? I don't want any money, I have a job.
| muyuu wrote:
| not sure why are you being downvoted, you have accurately
| described the incentive structure leading to these situations
| krapp wrote:
| You don't own the open source software you write, so you don't
| have the right to make demands of its users beyond what the
| license stipulates. That companies can make billions with your
| software and not owe you so much as a cup of coffee is not the
| dark side of open source, it's an expression of the same
| freedom that allows you to fork and reuse any FOSS software
| under the same terms.
|
| If you want to require payment from anyone who uses your
| software, _use a proprietary license and charge money._ The
| "fair share of revenue" in free for free and open source
| software is correctly "zero."
| ans123 wrote:
| Please stop the misinformation: Open source authors _do own_
| their IP, but are altruistic enough to license it to others.
|
| In the long term, altruism only works if there aren't too
| many leeches. Up to 2010, OSS authors at least got
| recognition, could stay aloof and in general weren't little
| corporate bitches.
|
| Now, this has changed, so there is no longer any point of
| writing OSS for free. The corporations have won their long
| term game, using the freedom propaganda until they owned most
| of it.
| muyuu wrote:
| once you distribute your code under a permissive licence,
| you typically don't get to undo that surrender of control
| over your work
|
| in that sense ownership is relative, for better or worse
|
| writing OSS will always make sense, for certain kinds of
| projects and perhaps without expecting much compensation fo
| it most of the time
| antran22 wrote:
| The point of open source is people can use it freely. A better
| project, which hits the right spots will naturally attract
| financial and technical support, both from the companies and
| the community. It is really just a free market, where the best
| projects survive.
| gbmark wrote:
| Financial support is pretty arbitrary and not related to
| quality, user numbers or importance of the software.
|
| OpenSSL has only recently received support despite powering
| all the Internet infrastructure for decades.
|
| Xorg, xterm etc. have received very little or nothing. Same
| for most Unix system tools.
|
| Projects that receive the most are "open" source corporate
| vanity projects that are also used for bait-and-switch
| hiring.
| thevagrant wrote:
| It's almost like open-source needs a micropayments
| solution.
|
| If every download cost a tiny amount, could it add up to
| pay some maintainers full time?
| radarsat1 wrote:
| Of course it's terrible to become burnt out and it feels awful
| not having enough time to work on an open source project that you
| love.
|
| But, is it just me or has it become rarer for open source project
| maintainers to feel free to let projects go? I don't mean to let
| them die, I mean, to find like-minded individuals to which you
| can defer some or all of the work? I realize that as the original
| author one feels a sense of ownership, but if you want it to
| continue, and you don't have the time, there is nothing wrong
| with putting out a call for someone to take over maintainership.
|
| Most projects that I've maintained have been my own work but I've
| also taken over maintainership from someone on a popular project,
| and it was a great experience. I got to work with a good code
| base, add my own ideas, offer some direction, and I learned a lot
| about maintaining code for longevity, integrating community
| contributions, and I cared about it probably more than I have for
| much of my own work, because I felt that I owed it to the
| original author to do a good job.
|
| Now, several years later, I do not use it myself as much, and I
| am perfectly ready to find a new maintainer for it, should
| someone appropriate come along. (That hasn't happened but the
| project no longer takes a lot of my time. since new solutions
| have come along, so it's fine. If it did take more time, it would
| mean there were more users, and therefore probably there would be
| more interested parties in taking over maintainership.)
|
| I encourage authors and maintainers who are feeling they are
| reaching this burnout stage to feel more comfortable putting out
| requests for help, it can be a good experience and even encourage
| community building around your work. You don't have to be a BDFL,
| you can be a temporary one.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Is this just a function of how long it takes to recreate ~80%
| of the functionality?
|
| It doesn't matter if it takes half a decade to implement the
| last 20% of the feature set and iron out all of the bugs and
| corner cases, if you can bang out a prototype in a long
| weekend, someone is going to do that over and over. Meanwhile,
| if it takes nearly a year just to get something half-working,
| the existing open source codebase has to be pretty bad for you
| to not at least fork it.
| c-cube wrote:
| A temporary BDFL... Would that be called a TBD (temporary
| benevolent dictator)? :)
| PebblesRox wrote:
| BDFN: benevolent dictator for now
| detaro wrote:
| Shouldn't it be BTD? Somehow that word order feels better.
| pram wrote:
| Benevolent Regent Lord
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| when I started work on ts-loader I went with "caretaker"
| https://blog.johnnyreilly.com/2016/11/01/but-you-cant-
| die-i-...
| robin_reala wrote:
| I think part of the worry of handing projects over stems from a
| couple of fairly high-profile events when projects were handed
| over to theoretically trust-worthy people who went rogue and
| used them as a platform for malware or spear phishing.
|
| Suddenly, even just relinquishing control can be a bad thing
| for the community.
| mavhc wrote:
| What's really required is to build a community large enough
| that the 0.1% of people who can run it are big enough to have
| a group in charge, set up a foundation etc etc. It's just
| like going from a monarchy to a democracy, hard, takes ages,
| fails a lot.
|
| That won't work for most small projects though, so orgs like
| https://sfconservancy.org/ exist.
|
| Not sure what other options like SFC exist, and the
| differences between them though.
|
| At a minimum you'd want them to be in charge, and fire the
| current lead developer if they go rogue.
| antran22 wrote:
| The thing is, if the new project maintainers go against the
| community, but the community really need to use it, the
| community will just fork out a new path and move on. If the
| project is really open source.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Nobody forks anymore. Almost nobody contributes anymore.
|
| People have no idea that's it's mainly charity. And even
| then people demand, get angry, don't read any docs, etc,
| etc.
|
| Bigtech sometimes helps by employing these guys. What is
| really needed is a service, which does the moderation and
| filtering. Kind of like oss communication management as a
| service. For example by github.
| scruffyherder wrote:
| Something like the patreon thing for sure which also
| means community outreach and engagement.
|
| It also means supporting other people and stepping up.
| It's so few and far that'll pay value for value.
| mook wrote:
| I think that was always the case -- the majority of
| people don't contribute meaningfully, and was quite
| demanding. I had an old open source project that got a
| few users, and eventually too many support requests for
| me to handle. Somebody stepped up and helped maintain
| things until I lost interest, but that was a very tiny
| fraction of the people involved. I was lucky there and
| (as far as I know) they never went rouge.
|
| Outsourced moderation would probably end up something
| like Stack Overflow -- useful things will be closed
| because non-subject-experts can't tell the difference
| between invalid questions and valid questions that look
| like invalid questions.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I don't think that really happens, anymore.
|
| Twenty years ago, they would have done that, but these
| days, someone would just write a replacement from scratch
| (quite possibly, proprietary), or everyone would abandon
| it, along with their own projects that depend on it.
|
| Most open-source (and closed-source) APIs and SDKs are
| "Swiss Army knife" projects, with many functions that serve
| many purposes. Most API consumers use only a subset of the
| interface, so "rolling their own" is not that intimidating.
|
| I think with all the security problems that we're seeing,
| these days, we may be headed for some agency/consortium
| that validates dependencies (with all the myriad problems,
| therein).
|
| We may be seeing more "semi-proprietary" stuff, soon.
|
| Not necessarily a bad thing, as I think that anyone that
| makes money on software should probably pay for it.
| antran22 wrote:
| I think we are straying from the point of FOSS once we
| talk about money. If I start a new open source project,
| it will be my gift to the world, and I expect to gain
| nothing from it financially. If Google make a billion
| bucks from my project then I'm sure some other dudes
| running a startup is using it too, and if my project
| helps them then I'm happy. If my help is not appreciated,
| lotsa luck gentlemen ;)
|
| As I have made my point before, if all I want is money I
| would spend my time working a paying job. But money is
| not everything isn't it?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Preaching to the choir, here. Take a gander at my work.
|
| But making things that other people depend on is an
| obligation; not just a vocation.
|
| I liken writing an SDK/API/library to having children.
| Once they are there, they aren't really my "property"
| anymore, and I am under an obligation to maintain and
| support them, so I need to keep that in mind, when I
| publish them. I need to play the long game.
|
| I've written a system that is used by thousands, around
| the world, and is the backbone infrastructure for a
| particular demographic. It is not hyperbole to say that
| lives depend on it. I worked on it for ten years, before
| transferring it.
|
| The best thing that I ever did for that system was toss
| the keys to a new team, and walk away. Nowadays, I'm just
| the dorky old man that chips in his two cents' worth,
| from time to time.
|
| I'm not particularly interested in getting into religious
| battles, which is fairly common in the [F]OSS community.
| I mostly code for the love of the craft. Delivering and
| supporting open-source projects helps me to have a
| purpose, but I also take my obligations quite seriously.
|
| One of those obligations is to go to great lengths to
| deliver _very_ high-quality software. I 'm quite aware
| that it is not commercially feasible to write software
| that meets my personal Quality bar, so I give it away for
| free,
| antran22 wrote:
| Also to refute your point here, I would say that there's
| not really that many project maintainers that just
| totally go rogue and kill the whole project. An event
| that was most similar to what I describe here is the
| Freenode boogaloo, and you can see that users started to
| move to Libera.Chat. If you advertise your product as
| community oriented and do stuff that your community
| despises then you basically have just shoot yourself in
| the foot.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| TBH, I'm not exactly sure how that "refutes my point." I
| apologize for mentioning money. I think that may have
| raised some hackles.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| In my opinion, there's just a shortage of experienced
| engineers.
|
| Everyone these days is chasing the latest Javascript framework
| hype and practicing the next big modern language, e.g. Rust or
| Go.
|
| But most important infrastructure open source is written in C++
| and to maintain a cross-platform library linked into hundreds
| of apps, you need years of practical working experience to
| accurately estimate the side effects down the line from a
| seemingly innocent patch.
|
| There's few people who have that experience. Plus as the
| greybeards retire, more and more companies need to hire this
| kind of developer to keep their own stuff running. So the
| people who could do open source usually have a waiting list for
| future freelancing clients.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As greybeard, I see the golden age of FOSS like disco/hippie
| days, eventually the majority that was against the man ended
| up working at wall street like jobs during the 80's and early
| 90s.
|
| Same will happen when everyone that actually made BSD and GNU
| happen is no longer around, it will be business as usual.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Often a project, a club, or even a company only hold because of
| one passionate individual. Once he is gone, it is the end. It
| is very hard to find someone with the same level of motivation.
| Projects stop being maintained, clubs cease activities, and
| companies get taken over for short term profit.
|
| It is particularly apparent in schools. Students start
| something, then they graduate and do something else. Most of
| the times, no one takes over, at least not in a sustainable
| way.
|
| It is not always the case, but it is the most common outcome.
| Simply, I think there are simply more people who want to start
| something than there are people who want to lead somebody
| else's project.
| chrchang523 wrote:
| There is an interesting "converse" to this observation for
| open-source projects, though. Namely: if a nontrivial
| abandoned project is still widely used, it probably
| represents a major career opportunity for anyone willing to
| take over maintenance.
|
| This isn't purely hypothetical: it's the foundation of my own
| career.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I don't know how the idea that people are replaceable got so
| popular. Yeah, I know why some people tried to make it so,
| but it's so blatantly false that I don't understand how those
| people were successful.
|
| Anyway, nobody ever simply gets replaced. When you change the
| people, things change. Some times it's a disaster, other
| times it's an improvement, but the result is never exactly
| like the beginning.
| icoder wrote:
| To maintain something you will need a match between what type
| of person is needed and what type of person is available. To
| start something, any type (well, very simply put) of person
| will do, often the need emerges from what they initiate.
|
| This may also explain the imbalance you see.
|
| Having said that, I also think that just as often it _seems_
| no one is available, until someone steps down and things do
| turn out allright. Of course this idea that a project will
| stop if the passionate individual stops is based on exactly
| the observation you describe! So that fuels the idea but
| you'll never know until you stop.
| wccrawford wrote:
| "I don't mean to let them die, I mean, to find like-minded
| individuals to which you can defer some or all of the work?"
|
| I've seen lots of these calls for help fail.
|
| And someone else points out: It's open source. Literally anyone
| can continue the work at any time. There's no need for the
| original creator to find someone else to continue it. Anyone
| can just do it.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Anyone can just do it._
|
| They literally can't though. Only the owner or a maintainer
| has permission to merge PRs in to the main branch. Anyone can
| fork a repo, write a patch, and PR it, but that's where
| outside contributions stop. It still takes someone from the
| original team to accept a contribution. Forking a project and
| then maintaining that fork as a separate project is an
| option, but it's divisive one that a lot of the community
| will react badly to if they see it as a hostile takeover or
| if there's a change in goal (eg making a commercial product
| out of the abandoned project.)
| h2odragon wrote:
| There's version control other that Git / GitHub / etc. It's
| even possible to _forego version control_ and just release
| tarballs somewhere.
| onion2k wrote:
| Ok, but you'd hope there's some form of access control
| that stops someone just overwriting the canonical source
| with their own version. That's the same as the maintainer
| having to accept changes.
|
| If there isn't, and anyone can write straight to the
| source, then good luck to anyone using that package
| because it's probably not very safe.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Or you maintain your own version. My projects got booted
| of GitHub when I did; I don't maintain a site anymore;
| but there's several forked versions of them floating out
| there somewhere, presumably because someone's still using
| them.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| There are endless examples of forks that pick up where some
| other project left off. They give it a new name, explain
| what's going on, and move on. If it's seen as hostile, that
| means the original project is still active and doesn't need
| this?
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| This has happened with some pretty big names, too. gcc
| did this, and so did Jenkins. Didn't node.js do this a
| few years ago, too?
| ericb wrote:
| This is a serious shortcoming in github's current UI.
| There's no easy discovery for which forks are active.
|
| It would be useful if there was a checkbox "Actively
| Publicly Maintained" in forked repos that defaults to Off.
|
| That way, on the forks page of a repo, if someone is
| offering an alternative, an "actively maintained" check
| mark (and perhaps a date) can be shown and it can bubble to
| the top of the "forks" list.
| sokoloff wrote:
| There's a community aspect to consider though. You and I
| could both decide to continue some open-source project. The
| community will (reasonably and maybe even "rightly") look to
| the original maintainer for guidance on which 0, 1, or 2
| forks they suggest to continue.
| gmueckl wrote:
| It's even worse with other patterns, e.g. when the original
| project is suffering from some bit rot, the maintainer is
| unresponsive for months, independent forks spring up to fix
| that rot and suddenly you get a bout of activity in the
| original project and then another lengthy period of
| silence.
| beckingz wrote:
| This is truly frustrating, and happens in organizations
| as well. It is admirable when people actually make
| decisions.
| josephg wrote:
| Yep. I think its important for project maintainers to be
| clear about the maintenance status of a project. You
| don't have to maintain a project forever, but if its not
| maintained its good to be clear about that.
|
| Eg: "This project works but will not be maintained.
| Github issues & PRs will be ignored. If you want changes,
| fork the project. If your fork is being actively
| maintained, let me know and I'll link to your fork from
| this readme."
| icoder wrote:
| Sure, one thing (it being OK to drop an already open source
| project) doesn't exclude the other (suggesting a fork if
| there happen to be any).
| blacktriangle wrote:
| This is partially why over the last few years I've been moving
| away from using smaller packages in favor of rolling my own.
| Big things like frameworks are generally safe bets, they
| generally are able to build a community around them pretty
| easily. But smaller libraries are often not worth the long-term
| risk.
| yarcob wrote:
| I maintain two slightly popular open source apps, and my
| experience is that there are a lot of people interested in
| using your product, but very few people interested in
| contributing to it.
|
| I've had a few people offer help over the course of the years,
| but unfortunately they don't always have all the skills needed,
| so they can only help with a part of the project. When they do
| have the necessary skills, they don't have the time.
|
| As I don't have the time to keep working on both projects for
| free, I'll probably abandon the lesser used one. I'd love to
| find a successor for the second project, but to be honest I
| don't have any idea how to go about finding that person.
|
| (I don't want to post specifics of the projects because I'm
| trying not to link this account with my real world identity)
| [deleted]
| cheph wrote:
| > I've had a few people offer help over the course of the
| years, but unfortunately they don't always have all the
| skills needed, so they can only help with a part of the
| project.
|
| So whats wrong with allowing them to help with those parts?
| bleepleblopple wrote:
| Allowing people to help also takes time...there's a non-
| trivial management effort involved...one that's too
| frequently forgotten about in these discussions.
| jckahn wrote:
| This is very true. Even when collaborating with very
| skilled engineers, it takes a lot of time and energy to
| respond to ideas, questions, and review PRs. It's like a
| regular programming job to a certain degree, but you're
| typically not paid for doing it.
| cheph wrote:
| Software can be shitty garbage in many ways. It can be
| shitty garbage by having lots of bugs, and it can be
| shitty garbage by having a maintainer which cares more
| about bottlenecking all changes than about the future of
| a project.
|
| But everyone is free to make shitty software, so have at
| it.
| yuvalr1 wrote:
| I don't know why you're being downvoted for a truly honest
| question.
|
| The answer to this is that getting partial help sometimes
| costs more time than getting no help at all.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| This seems like one of the potential tragedies of the "all
| volunteer" development model. Many of the factors that play
| into Brooks's Law apply just as much to volunteer efforts
| as they do to commercial efforts.
|
| One of them is the cost of communication. My sense is that
| the overall cost of communication scales in a manner that's
| more in line with the number of active contributors than it
| does with the actual volume of communication that they
| produce. Even the actual time spent communicating may not
| do so, but the kinds of communication - getting to know new
| people and new teams, negotiating different and potentially
| conflicting needs, stuff like that - tend to be more tiring
| than the communication you get in a stable team of people
| who have been working together for a while.
|
| But, if you can't make a living doing it, then you probably
| aren't prepared to contribute more than a very small amount
| of your time. A large group of people doing that might have
| an outrageous communication cost relative to its productive
| output. With the brunt of that being born by the
| maintainer.
|
| I would imagine that, if we could figure out a better way
| to enable maintainers to support themselves and their
| families while also working on their project full time,
| things might work out better. More time spent programming
| means less need to negotiate with and review contributions
| from others, and the work getting done more quickly because
| it's being done by the person who knows the code best, and
| the job being both less tiring and less thankless, and
| possibly leads to higher quality (by virtue of being more
| coherently designed) software in the long run.
| imiric wrote:
| Have you considered adding your project to a site like
| https://www.codeshelter.co/ ?
|
| I don't have experience with it, but it seems active and
| better than abandoning a project.
|
| Good luck!
| cheph wrote:
| > But, is it just me or has it become rarer for open source
| project maintainers to feel free to let projects go?
|
| I think it has always been rare. I generally avoid projects
| which are under a person's own github account because to me it
| is a massive red flag that they will kill the project by
| failing to maintain it and failing to hand it over at some
| point in time.
|
| When you build a project the most important part is to
| eliminate dependency on yourself. If you are approving all
| commits, or doing most changes, you need to fix it, because it
| is a problem.
|
| I don't really understand pedronauck's response. If he does not
| have time, he should tell people he does not have time and they
| should make PRs, is that not the point of open source projects?
|
| There is nothing wrong with demanding that people help
| themselves, people are not entitled to your time, and unless
| you are not processing PRs then you are not the problem.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| In an ideal world you're right. But most people don't create
| projects expecting -- or even wanting -- huge success.
|
| 1. Sometimes people create a project for themselves but use
| Github as a convenient place to store the code. I've done
| that before and found people filing issues against those
| projects.
|
| 2. Sometimes people create a project to scratch a personal
| itch and put it online in case it helps anyone else. Not in
| the sense of hoping people will use it but rather than in the
| "I bought 10 bottles of wine and only drank 9. Help
| yourselves to the last bottle" sense.
|
| Maybe there should be (maybe there already is) a software
| license that should better explain the "wrote this for
| myself. You're free to use it but don't expect support".
|
| 3. Some people probably do hope that their project has some,
| maybe even just small, degree of success but they host in
| their own user profile because their Github profile is their
| CV and they're starting new projects in the hope of landing
| better jobs.
|
| This 3rd group are a particular problem for open source. Not
| in the sense that they're doing anything wrong -- they're
| clearly not. But in the sense that you end up with a lot of
| NIH since the primary reason for a project existing is to
| boost the CV. So when the primary maintainer moves on, any
| future contributors will prefer to build their own solution
| rather for their own CV rather than taking over maintenance
| of the existing project.
|
| ---
|
| It should also be noted that not all projects are large
| enough to warrant their own Github org. Take BurntSushi's
| stuff. I'd wager the percentage of HN developers who use
| BurntSushi's code is in the double figures. But there'd be no
| sense in every one of his projects being it's own org.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > Maybe there should be (maybe there already is) a software
| license that should better explain the "wrote this for
| myself. You're free to use it but don't expect support".
|
| Put that in the readme?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > But, is it just me or has it become rarer for open source
| project maintainers to feel free to let projects go? I don't
| mean to let them die, I mean, to find like-minded individuals
| to which you can defer some or all of the work?
|
| There are few projects that actually get used for longer than a
| couple years at most, the churn (especially in JS projects) is
| massive. You'll always find people to work on Big Old Stuff
| that's used everywhere - think Linux kernel, Qt/KDE, Gnome,
| Firefox, Thunderbird, libc, gcc, LLVM, jQuery, ReactJS - but
| the small stuff that gets disrupted ehhh replaced by some
| shinier newer toy? That will eventually diminish and die off,
| when the original author either has all their needs met, burns
| out or no longer needs the project.
|
| Additionally, all of the above projects have massive financial
| firepower and/or other institutional backing behind them that
| contributes either with direct man hours or financial grants.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Davidism took on Flask/Pallets really well, I think.
| genezeta wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's "become" rare or rarer. But in a way
| Github, npm, or maybe it was just ourselves in general... but
| we seem to have promoted the idea of "build it and they will
| come" to an unrealistic level.
|
| While interested people will come, I think it _is_ rare that a
| distant and complete stranger will suddenly appear and not only
| share your same interests but also with the same level of
| compromise. And given that some projects now seem to suffer
| sudden popularity growths as flavour of the month -or week-, it
| would also be rare that such a person or persons would appear
| before that happens and the pressure suddenly increases.
| watwut wrote:
| > But, is it just me or has it become rarer for open source
| project maintainers to feel free to let projects go? I don't
| mean to let them die, I mean, to find like-minded individuals
| to which you can defer some or all of the work?
|
| Burnouts like this happen, because it is not actually possible
| to keep working on side projects for 30 hours a week on top of
| actual 40 hours a week work.
|
| Whoever would take it would face the exact same issue.
| CJefferson wrote:
| I think with the modern internet, and GitHub, it's much harder.
| It used to be reasonable to make a release every year or so,
| and basically not be in communication other than that. You
| could also assume all your dependencies would release updates
| every year. Now people expect replies to their GitHub issues
| within a few days, if you have CI you were probably using
| Travis and had to update everything, etc.
| CR007 wrote:
| I believe that GitHub problem is that people not into
| software development are pushing those actually developing at
| a very low developer/user ratio, it always feels like a never
| ending task and people won't ever stop asking features as
| they got used to see Corp projects next to project garages in
| the same service?
|
| To release way less often has been one of the best changes
| I've made and also dual licensing. If people will get me a
| hard time then pay for that part of the development.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > there is nothing wrong with putting out a call for someone to
| take over maintainership
|
| Why is this necessary? If someone wants to start maintaining a
| project, all they need to do is fork it. For example, ZBar is
| now being maintained by a Linux kernel developer. His fork
| started getting updates and contributions and is now
| objectively better than the original project. Linux
| distributions have already accepted it as the master branch.
| kstenerud wrote:
| It's actually very hard to find help on an open source project.
| People are fine with submitting the odd PR here and there or
| reporting issues, but actually RUNNING a project, in whole or
| in part, is a serious commitment that few people will find the
| energy to stick with.
| thrower123 wrote:
| At this point, I tend to view open source software not as free as
| in beer, or free as in speech, but free as in mattress left on
| the side of the road with a "Free" sign.
|
| Expect nothing, and you can only be positively surprised.
| diegoperini wrote:
| Dear open source software maintainers,
|
| Don't use only PayPal to accept donations. There are countries
| out there (i.e Turkey) that don't allow PayPal payments.
|
| P.S: I'm not specifically addressing to Pedro Nauck.
| thiago_fm wrote:
| So now they even have to care a lot about payment providers in
| order to receive money?
|
| I bet if you really want to contribute even receiving some
| Amazon voucher would help. Just send then an E-mail and sort it
| out.
| gabereiser wrote:
| What's really sad about this (and other open source devs with
| pressure from users) is the lack of support _from the users_.
| Open source should be about being able to dive in and add the
| wishlist item you have. A lot of people put up this wall that
| only changes can be made by the author, proliferating this
| onslaught of requests from the user and in the end burning out
| the author.
|
| If you manage an open source project, you owe it to _yourself_ to
| make it clear how other devs can contribute and add features they
| want to see. Don't be the choke point. Open it up. That's the
| whole point. Make it clear how a user can add to the codebase and
| encourage them to do so.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| One of these days, a startup will tackle this problem and offer
| paid support for any open source project.
| cortexio wrote:
| Try to care less about what other people want. It's your project,
| not theirs. Also, there will always be someone who wants another
| feature. always. It never stops. So, i'd recommend only doing the
| features you personally want and tell the others: no thanks.
|
| Side note, there are alot of manipulative people on the internet
| that dont have the skills to create something, and they will try
| to say certain things to you, so you would create the things they
| want. And they may act like they care about your project, but
| they dont, they just care about themselfs, and then on monday
| they tell their boss, look, i created this new feature. It's sad,
| but i've met people like that.
| debarshri wrote:
| One of the observations I have had is supporting opensource on
| donations is not a model that works long term. It could have been
| true back in the 90s and early 2000s. But these days the tech
| shift happens at very fast rate. So if your opensource product or
| concept is successful in the market, you cannot compete with
| another product or a startup cloning you idea on donations.
|
| As coding and software development is getting democratized, if
| you have a concept that definitely has a market even though you
| are first to market. Other developers will build similar product
| and saturate the market, essentially diluting your value. For
| instance, I have been tracking Heroku style deployment tools in
| the market, there is like tons of opensource platform doing the
| same thing built by startup as well as individual developers.
| Same for opensource airtable clones.
| santoshalper wrote:
| Imagine giving so much of your life, passion, and energy away for
| free, then feeling guilty that you couldn't give even more. I'm
| glad Pedro decided to step back to focus on his health. That is
| not an easy decision to make. As he starts to return, I hope he
| will consider letting others take up part of the work and
| shoulder some of the burden. This kind of open source vampirism
| isn't healthy.
| slver wrote:
| Let's invent a token so we can trade goods and services with it
| so people like this can hire more developers and offload work to
| them.
| inbx0 wrote:
| Can we call it the Done Labour Reimbursement token?
| cortexio wrote:
| hmmm.. so.. money? :)
| [deleted]
| Johnyma22 wrote:
| My technique to avoid burn out is to hack for X duration then
| take Y time off and let the community fill in the gaps.
|
| I'm currently on a 6 month hiatus from OSS, no one has notified
| me of any fires so I think everything is just fine without me
| which is how it should be.
| scruffyherder wrote:
| OSS like the audio?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| It's very sad to see this happen. Open Source project leads, this
| is important: You need to stop thinking about other people using
| your project.
|
| It's incredibly kind of you to consider your users so much, but
| OSS only works (in the I'm-just-a-guy-in-a-basement-without-
| funding way) if it is a _personal project_. That is to say, if it
| 's something you make for _yourself_ , for fun. Once you start
| worrying about other people, how they will use it, what they
| want, etc, it stops being fun. If it's not fun, and you're not
| getting paid for it, it's just going to kill the project (and can
| make you totally stressed out).
|
| There are strategies you can use to maintain the project:
|
| - Put out a call for help on your README. Ask for developers to
| join your project. Ask for people to field user requests. Ask for
| people to write documentation. You may not get any help at all,
| but sometimes all you need to do is ask.
|
| - Create a specific method of receiving requests, like a mailing
| list (one for bugs, one for discussion, one for feature requests,
| one for security). A mailing list can act as a small road block
| to filter out less urgent requests, and can make it slightly
| easier to manage in one place.
|
| - In the past I have tried "feature bounties", a sort of donation
| where someone paid me just to develop some feature. It didn't
| work out well. I still had a full-time job, so while the extra
| money was nice, I still had to dedicate all my extra time to the
| feature, and if I got sick of it and wanted to quit, I felt extra
| bad because I had accepted a donation just for it. Plus it
| required more support later. So I still think you should ignore
| any requests that aren't something you personally want, and
| remind people to send you patches if they want code merged.
| Donations are nice, but be wary if they make you feel beholden to
| the users.
|
| - Be direct with people. Tell them, "This is my personal project,
| I only spend X hours a week/month on it, so do not expect any
| support or features." Sometimes this is enough to get people off
| your back. Otherwise, I recommend moving off of GitHub or
| disabling all the features so you don't get barraged with
| requests.
|
| - Above all: have fun! If you're not having fun with your
| project, either end it, or make some changes to make it fun
| again.
| ______- wrote:
| I started appreciating single duty snippets of code instead of
| creating large abstractions that tie together multiple snippets
| of code that all work together. I do this to set myself up for
| success. (Think of it as making the rungs on a ladder closer
| together).
|
| I haven't fully gone _no-code_ [0], but I am close to it. I also
| do this to avoid the burnout trap. Working on large projects is
| physically and mentally taxing and it's only over longer periods,
| you find the project is actually an _insurmountable_ task.
|
| Then on top of this, FOSS is never finished. Only few projects
| have a finished feel to them, and even those require
| modifications and upgrades. This is why forking dead projects is
| always a great idea, and why FOSS succeeds.
|
| [0] https://bubble.io/blog/no-code-manifesto/
| fock wrote:
| and of course: it's javascript! because literally every other
| community would have no problem if their doc-generator got
| unmaintained, because it would probably run for another ten
| years...
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| There's also a defective culture meme that believes software
| that hasn't been updated in the past week is dying.
|
| This is a conceptual hack to avoid considering the state of the
| ecosystem.
| gwd wrote:
| I think GP is trying to imply that there's so much churn in
| the Javascript ecosystem that any project which isn't updated
| will actually stop working in a relatively short amount of
| time.
| Igelau wrote:
| Pretty sure "Hello World" develops a major security
| vulnerability in a dependency you didn't know about if you
| go two weeks without looking at it.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| It's been a big adjustment to me switching all my
| recreational programming over to Common Lisp. In the CL
| community, it's not uncommon for a widely used library to not
| have been updated in 5-10 years. In any other language
| community, that would mean unmaintained, bitrotted, unusable.
| In the CL community, it usually means it's finished, and
| doesn't need any more changes.
| slver wrote:
| It's not a defective culture meme, because the modern
| ecosystem is moving fast. We're using to thinking about
| digital creations as if they're forever. This is incorrect.
| Software without a platform doesn't run. Platforms are always
| changing, and sometimes platforms die and get replaced with
| other ones.
|
| Think of software like a living being, not like a statue
| etched in stone (although even statues etched in stone
| degrade).
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| You could almost say it was a Cambrian explosion of sorts?
|
| It's 2012 all over again: "churn makes things better! BTW,
| what should we be using this week?"
| scruffyherder wrote:
| I'd say it's forever 1997. Netscape had a server side
| JavaScript platform in 1997.
|
| People still build 3 tier apps, and web farms. It's
| eternal 1997.
| KirillPanov wrote:
| There's really something to be said for software that is so
| ruthlessly simple it runs forever without maintenance. Like
| most of what DJB has written: djbdns still works after all
| these years... And of course Knuth's TeX.
|
| Maybe people shouldn't start software projects if there isn't a
| "can leave it here unmaintained" milestone within sight.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Maybe people shouldn't start software projects if there
| isn't a "can leave it here unmaintained" milestone within
| sight.
|
| It's because these projects have tons of dependencies and
| moving parts which tend to break themselves (often for very
| little reasons) so of course it's going to affect upstream.
|
| The software you listed are usually mostly self-contained or
| rely on stable projects.
|
| There is no such thing as "stability" in the Node.js
| ecosystem (which isn't javascript itself).
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I think you just said exactly what the parent comment
| meant.
|
| Nodejs is the new Java jar dependency hell.
|
| Maybe package the entire project into a docker container so
| that people can download and run the pile of dependencies
| in one step.
| progx wrote:
| `entire project into a docker container `, like Linux
| Flatpak.
|
| It is not a nodejs specific problem, every software with
| dependencies has it. (some more, some less)
| ericholscher wrote:
| I had a similar moment where I almost gave up on Read the Docs,
| going as far as writing a similar post but never publishing it. I
| wrote about that experience here:
| https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/feb/7/the-post-i-neve...
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Commenting more on the general pattern than specific case here,
| but sounds like the only failure here could have been to either
| 1) ask for help or 2) effectively delegate
|
| At some point a leader/entrepreneur has to get out of the way and
| open the path for others to do some/all of the lifting.
| ajarmst wrote:
| The only problem here is that the author perceives a need to
| apologize, or to even feel regret. If the only compensation for
| starting and maintaining an open source project is the work
| itself or personal use of the product, then you are your only
| customer. The moment it stops being fun or worth the effort, you
| have every right to just stop without feeling a tiny bit of guilt
| or remorse.
|
| You have a bug they want to fix or a feature they want to add and
| the author/maintainer is not doing it fast enough? Fork away!
| Submit a pull request! Oh, you don't have the skills/time to do
| that? Wow, that's too bad. Offer to pay the author! Post a
| message to the project list or bug reporting tool offering to pay
| someone to do it for you. Oh, you want it for free? Immediately?
| You built critical infrastructure around a tool you don't
| understand and don't have the skills or resources to maintain?
| You're a parasite, and can be safely muted and ignored.
|
| This is the important bit: If you're afraid the person
| maintaining your key infrastructure for free might suddenly stop
| doing that, just take some time to send them a nice note thanking
| them. Periodically getting one of those in your inbox is
| remarkably effective in maintaining passion for a project. Find a
| way to give them a gift. Do they have Venmo/Patreon/Amazon wish
| list? Use it. Are you a developer or do you employ some? Fix a
| bug. Say nice things about them in social media. Offer to help
| pay for the resources to host the project. Send them an effing
| Starbuck's card with your sincere thanks.
| ezekielchen wrote:
| I think this is the kind of problem that might be solved by
| tokenomics. Gitcoin (https://gitcoin.co/) seems like a good step
| forward.
| young_unixer wrote:
| And Github still doesn't allow you to disable pull requests or
| issues in a repository.
|
| If I had an open source project, I would not publish it on Githib
| precisely for this reason. Open source doesn't necessarily imply
| open development, or horizontal organization, or constant
| support, or anything. It just implies that the _source_ is open.
|
| Plus, on the Internet it's very hard to tell when someone is
| demanding something from you from when someone is just making a
| suggestion.
| rirze wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you can archive a repository and disable issues
| that way. I've seen that happen (unfortunately) to a few
| libraries I follow.
| Nition wrote:
| You actually can disable issues now; I'm glad they finally
| added it as an option.[1]
|
| [1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/administering-a-
| repository...
| joeblau wrote:
| I've seen few OSS burn out posts lately. I created gitignore.io
| and I'm thankful it wasn't that successful because even the 5
| hours a month I put in didn't yield much financial compensation.
|
| There should really be a more transparent way that projects like
| this, canihazip, gitignore, redis, and a bunch of other projects
| can be sustainably run.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Looking at https://gitignore.io - there is plenty of empty
| space and nothing, even subtle and small like "I would
| appreciate donations" with link/button.
|
| I also see nothing in https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io
| and GitHub sponsoring seems to be not enabled.
|
| (just mentioning in case you would make it more clear that you
| would be happy about donations)
| joeblau wrote:
| I sold the site to Toptal 2 years ago, but trust me I had
| donate buttons, crypto donate buttons, I messaged multiple
| big tech firms that used my project to ask for sponsorships,
| I ran ads using carbon. I tried a lot of things over the 7
| years of running it and lots of the avenues failed or didn't
| generate enough revenue.
|
| Now I understand that the project was not _that_ valuable but
| it would have been nice if I could have run it as a lifestyle
| business.
| asim wrote:
| After 6 years of working on two open source projects full time
| (16k and 10k GitHub stars) I decided to close off issues and
| discussions. GitHub has a nice checkbox you can untick to remove
| that tab and I did it. It's a thankless job, one that's pretty
| stressful and it's unclear what you gain from letting people
| berate or complain at you about their problems. I think I mostly
| built these tools for myself anyway so it felt like the right
| time.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Dude, you spent your own free time which you barely had making
| software for others. You could've done anything else with that
| time and you spent it helping others.
|
| And now you have to take care of your mental health, because when
| you're burnt out or miserable you psychologically can't help
| others. You take time off for yourself now or eventually you'll
| physically and mentally break down and be forced to take time
| off. So even now your decision to care for yourself is actually
| for the benefit of others.
|
| You have nothing to be sorry for. Thank you for giving docz to
| the world, and I hope you feel better soon :)
| [deleted]
| hnthrowaway2 wrote:
| Instead of expecting corporate users to pay (which can be
| difficult, corporate finance depts are good at spending large
| sums of money, but suck at small expenses), or acknowledge use
| (company policies might mean employees are not allowed to),
| perhaps the major hosting providers such as Github and Gitlab can
| directly remunerate open source repo maintainers depending on the
| popularity of the hosted repo? Surely they make a lot of money by
| more and more devs adopting their service?
|
| Edit: I am the owner of an open source repo on Github which was
| quite popular a while ago, but fell into disrepair because I
| could no longer find the time to maintain it. So I understand the
| pain of this person.
| josephg wrote:
| I like the idea, but I don't think it should be on github's
| shoulders to directly fund opensource. They do more than
| enough.
|
| What I'd like to see is a fund which companies who use
| opensource are expected to contribute to. For every 100
| employees at your company building on top of opensource
| software, I'd like to see at least 1 employee's salary funneled
| into the opensource ecosystem. That fund could have a default
| division based on community needs, or each company could
| specify how their donations are allocated. And if they donate
| by having their employees publish generally useful packages,
| thats fine too.
|
| I don't think it should be compulsory, but I want this stuff to
| be very visible. If someone files an issue against one of my
| projects, I want to know if the organization they're part of
| contributes to the community, and how, and to what projects. If
| you want me to donate my time to fix an issue you're running
| into, but you don't contribute back in any way, I'd like to
| know that before I decide if I'm going to spend my weekend
| helping out.
|
| Right now there's no incentive for companies to contribute to
| opensource because contributions are generally invisible. And
| bugs they run into usually get fixed anyway. If we tie a
| company's contributions to their reputation, and make
| reputation affect public standing, we might have a shot at
| changing social norms.
| glangdale wrote:
| Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its
| way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that
| make money for other people - including big commercial interests
| - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking
| money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement:
| "we use project X" - even privately.
|
| A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hyperscan
| high performance regular expression library) had to shed most of
| its staff (including all the original folks who worked on it,
| including me). One of the big contributing factors was a sense
| that "well, who really uses this". The answer was "tons of
| people, including some major Intel target customers" but a number
| of Hyperscan users picked up the library and never told anyone
| (not asking for public plaudits, but even a private communication
| would have been something to show our management).
|
| When you can't even say "thank you, we're using your library now,
| it's great" in a goddamn email, don't be surprised when 75% of
| the people maintaining and advancing it don't have jobs anymore.
| Never mind paying money or contributing - even acknowledgement.
|
| Open source is a recipe for burn-out. If something is important
| to people - especially corporate interests - there needs to be a
| way of getting paid. Much as I dislike those wacky "free for non-
| commercial use, otherwise, give me a call" licenses, I'm starting
| to see the point.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I've actively resisted open sourcing some things I've written
| at work - including stuff that I'm sure others would like -
| precisely because of fears that it would be a career-limiting
| move. For my employer, these libraries are only valuable to the
| extent that they help us build things for which we can charge
| money. An open source library would not be one of those things,
| but it _would_ take time (and therefore company money) to
| maintain such a thing. So putting myself in a position to be
| maintaining open source software on company time has the
| potential to greatly reduce my value to the company.
| [deleted]
| snth wrote:
| I think getting your name and work out in the world with open
| source work is a career _advancing_ move.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I've honestly never been at a job interview where people
| gave a crap about my open source contributions. They're
| typically much more interested in hearing war stories from
| the closed source projects I've worked on.
|
| The thing about open source projects is, they tend to be
| slightly generic things like "file format," "widget
| library," or "machine learning algorithm" that most
| companies see as the kind of thing they can typically get
| for free from open source. (They're not wrong there - the
| fact that we're talking about my open source contributions
| here makes it almost tautological.) They also tend to
| involve the sorts of generic programming skills that, by
| virtue of being stuff that we all know at least somewhat
| well, aren't all _that_ valuable. Supply and demand works
| with job skills, too.
|
| By contrast, my commercial work tends to involve a lot of
| specialized knowledge that's quite uncommon, and also tends
| to produce the kinds of software that people are quite
| happy to pay a lot of money for.
| autarch wrote:
| > I've honestly never been at a job interview where
| people gave a crap about my open source contributions.
| They're typically much more interested in hearing war
| stories from the closed source projects I've worked on.
|
| Counterpoint - I have. Many times.
|
| I created some Perl libraries (most notable <a
| href="https://metacpan.org/dist/DateTime">DateTime</a>
| and <a href="https://metacpan.org/dist/Log-Dispatch">Log-
| Dispatch</a>) that were used by a huge percentage of
| companies using Perl for applications (as opposed to
| simple scripts or sysadmin). This often came up in
| interviews, and I'm sure it helped me get more and better
| offers.
|
| Nowadays, as fewer companies are using Perl for
| applications, it's probably less helpful, but it doesn't
| hurt.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Ha. I had actually thought about mentioning that this
| situation seemed to be very different 20 years ago, but
| decided I had already done enough blathering.
|
| But, anyway, yeah - I think that this was different 20
| years ago, back when open source hadn't quite completely
| disrupted the software industry and companies didn't yet
| understand the economics of open source.
| autarch wrote:
| This still helped me as recently as 2017, so it's not
| like this stopped being true 20 years ago.
| deckard1 wrote:
| To be fair, that's like the guy that wrote moment-js or
| jQuery. I've worked at a number of Perl-based companies
| and every single one used DateTime (I'm a huge fan, btw).
| Something like that is going to be noticeable on a
| resume. Assuming they have some experience with Perl.
|
| There was a company I know of that was advertising in
| their job postings that the guy that wrote Perl's DBI
| once worked for them or was their CTO or whatever. That
| was about 6 years ago, so not that far off.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| I've long believed "open source" is for suckers for exactly
| this reason. Literally being open source, having the code open
| for review, isn't a problem. But usually "Open Source" also
| ends up meaning free as in beer, for EVERYONE, whether you're
| some college student or a billion dollar company.
|
| The only sane, healthy, sustainable license is the "wacky" one
| you describe: individuals (and possibly even (very) small
| businesses) can use it for free. Everyone else needs to pony
| up. It's absurd that a ton of the software allowing giant
| corporations to run day-to-day is not only created but ACTIVELY
| MAINTAINED by an individual or groups of individuals for free,
| as if they were running a soup kitchen. Microsoft, Amazon and
| Google are not homeless. They can, and should, pay the people
| that make the software that keeps them going.
|
| "But if it's open source, couldn't they just fork it and keep
| using that for free?" Yes, but a. not legally, if the terms
| forbid it and b. They would now have to find a new group of
| people to maintain the code, after just creating a bunch of
| ill-will in everyone in that space. In the end nothing is
| absolute: you can always just pirate closed-source commercial
| software too. But doing so has serious negative consequences.
| iLikeFreeData wrote:
| Not everyone needs more money.
|
| I've been struggling with the question, how do I want to
| spend all this money?
|
| I decided to diversify, but one of those places is a true to
| heart non profit charity that doesn't make a profit. I spend
| time on a business that if it becomes profitable, it's due to
| physical book sales while the same digital books are free.
|
| And I have for profit projects and investments.
|
| Each is different in my goals.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| pg has a good article on doing things that don't scale[0] and
| showed how the AirBnB guys went and setup the first listings
| manually, but it's actually far more general than just
| kicking off the network effect. Moats are things that don't
| scale. Open Source software scales perfectly. Billion dollar
| companies are billion dollar companies because they can use
| Open Source software wrapped around some Moat-able structure.
| The more Open Source Software that exists, the bigger the
| garden.
|
| When Google spends a billion dollars sending cars all around
| the world taking pictures, they are doing so in a way that
| the Open Source world can't centrally compete against, as
| they don't have the billions to get that done. This means
| that all Open Source mapping software will be missing a
| crucial feature that users rely on, and will therefore go
| unused. But meanwhile the libraries that those Open Source
| Software use, Google can freely use within their walled
| garden. On the other hand, Microsoft paid a great deal of
| money to researchers with Encarta and had this same exact
| structure and Wikipedia came in and disrupted them. It takes
| more time for the decentralized approach to come online, but
| as long as it's possible and the data is kept high quality
| Google Maps will slowly lose market share to OSM.
|
| So eventually decentralized open source software will catch
| up and these billion dollar companies will go to 0, but in
| the interim period, and as innovation never truly ends so
| there is always a new horizon, we should consider creating a
| better incentive structure.
|
| The big problem with capitalism today is that we care very
| deeply about prices. Prices is where supply and demand match,
| but we no longer have any supplies. We have costs of 0 and
| values that can differ between people. Price is merely a
| negotiation between the two, with Open Source Software
| declaring 0% of the value, and Billion Dollar companies
| declaring 90% of the value. Price has become a flawed metric.
| What society truly cares about is the surplus. What we need
| is a way to do a sort of Incentive Compability system[1](i.e.
| a Vickrey Auction) so that these Open Source Software can
| show the value that they produce. If they can show that their
| development costs were offset by their users values, they
| should be funded for it. Linux would certainly have a much
| higher value than Microsoft in this view, and would therefore
| be able to fund their own data collection systems, and would
| likely leave those open to the world so that everyone could
| reuse the Linux Street Map data for themselves.
|
| [0]:http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
|
| [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_compatibility
| galimaufry wrote:
| GPL is also a possible alternative. Big companies pay you
| back by contributing to the project, insofar as it is worth
| it to them to maintain a fork and add features for their own
| use.
| phh wrote:
| Sadly, GPL doesn't give you that. It only gives users the
| modified source code. No history, no time of fork. And
| nothing to the developer.
|
| I think it might be time to upgrade GPL to the age of
| modern internet, and have licenses requiring that
| modification are actually PR-ed (or sent by mail or
| whatever) to the author.
|
| Hell I'd even think that there could be licenses where you
| are required to use mainline for anything remotely looking
| like production, and you are not allowed to fork, you're
| only allowed to use as-is, and to contribute. This one
| would definitely not be considered FLOSS, but some
| components really would benefit from not having an infinite
| number of forks, like the Linux kernel.
| ludamad wrote:
| This unfortunately worked much better before it was
| feasible to hide everything behind a server, having no
| releases so to speak at all
| zacmps wrote:
| Is this not the purpose of AGPL?
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| > The only sane, healthy, sustainable license is the "wacky"
| one you describe: individuals (and possibly even (very) small
| businesses) can use it for free. Everyone else needs to pony
| up. It's absurd that a ton of the software allowing giant
| corporations to run day-to-day is not only created but
| ACTIVELY MAINTAINED by an individual or groups of individuals
| for free, as if they were running a soup kitchen. Microsoft,
| Amazon and Google are not homeless. They can, and should, pay
| the people that make the software that keeps them going.
|
| > "But if it's open source, couldn't they just fork it and
| keep using that for free?" Yes, but a. not legally, if the
| terms forbid it and b. They would now have to find a new
| group of people to maintain the code, after just creating a
| bunch of ill-will in everyone in that space. In the end
| nothing is absolute: you can always just pirate closed-source
| commercial software too. But doing so has serious negative
| consequences.
|
| This is neither free nor open by either the OSI or the FSF's
| definitions.
|
| The real problem is that there is a fundamental crisis at the
| intersection of capitalism and human freedom/autonomy that
| may be impossible to resolve.
| dabockster wrote:
| > This is neither free nor open by either the OSI or the
| FSF's definitions.
|
| In the famous words of Peter Griffin, "OH MY GOD WHO THE
| [expletive] CARES?!!"
|
| If someone isn't being paid for their work, then _any_
| version of OSS isn 't really sustainable long term.
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| > In the famous words of Peter Griffin, "OH MY GOD WHO
| THE [expletive] CARES?!!"
|
| The definitions of these terms have existed for decades.
| Trying to confuse or conflate them is just a slight of
| hand to generally disingenuous ends. Very little stops
| people from selling products under whatever terms they
| want. If they are honest, they can call their product
| what it is: proprietary. Otherwise it is just using the
| term 'open' to virtue signal. So 'open' becomes the new
| 'green'.
|
| > If someone isn't being paid for their work, then any
| version of OSS isn't really sustainable long term.
|
| Exactly my point.
|
| FOSS (for the most part) can't achieve financial
| viability in the current economic system (along with
| several other things).
|
| Electronics are integral to contemporary existence in
| most of the world.
|
| Without full control over their tools, human beings
| cannot be free/autonomous.
| zxzax wrote:
| I've never liked that approach, it's leading with the stick
| and not the carrot and IMO it defeats the purpose of open
| source. It cuts away one of the main benefits of open source
| -- that companies can use it and start contributing back to
| it right away with no friction. AFAIK Microsoft, Amazon and
| Google actually DO hire a lot of open source maintainers at
| this time, for exactly this reason.
| cnml123 wrote:
| Companies rarely contribute back except for very few
| projects like gcc and LLVM.
|
| FAANG does hire OSS devs, but a lot of them don't really do
| that much apart from being excellent politicians. To be
| fair, they don't get any time for OSS development in the
| first place.
|
| However, they do have time for politics and often ruin the
| projects. People play along because they want to get hired
| at GNAAF.
|
| As a result, these projects combine the worst of corporate
| and OSS development (horrible atmosphere and yet no money
| for development).
| dabockster wrote:
| Not just politics, but often they'll couple OSS to their
| own build systems and stuff. Yeah, it might be 50ms
| faster on paper, but that whole project now depends on
| that company's OSS licensing allowing that dependency to
| exist publicly. That's some really scary power.
| zksmk wrote:
| A bit off topic, but instead of FAANG (Facebook, Apple,
| Amazon, Netflix, Google) I much more prefer the MAAAF or
| FAAAM acronym (Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon,
| Microsoft) because their monopolies basically make them a
| mafia family, and I don't really see Netflix belonging in
| the group.
| rkntt wrote:
| That's a good point, also Netflix rarely has bad press as
| far as I know.
|
| MAAAF for Mafia of MAGAF (Make Google Great Again, F...)
| are nicer.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| If you want to make the allusion to the Mafia more
| obvious, then Apple could be abbreviated "i" (as in iOS,
| iPhone, iPad, etc.).
| zxzax wrote:
| That seems to be a mostly orthogonal concern -- you're
| talking about a general issue of "doing business with big
| corporations" and not really something I would say is
| specific to any given project. One way to help improve
| the situation would be to help them win those battles so
| they can negotiate for more time to upstream useful
| things.
| spion wrote:
| The problem isn't the software but the discussion around it.
| With discussions, issues, feature requests etc you can be a
| contributor or you can be a user (beneficiary). There should
| be a possibility to distinguish between both and require
| compensation from beneficiaries.
|
| We already do this to an extent but the mechanisms are not
| strict enough. The stake on the ground needs to be put much
| earlier on, for much less demand than it typically is.
| jags wrote:
| I like this idea! Free for small and paid for medium/big. I
| think the real wisdom lies in taking the middle path
| (mostly). I recently read how babel, a project used by
| millions, struggled to keep few full-time developers. It was
| heart-breaking. Great developers gets glued to the idea of
| open-for-all at the cost of practicality. It's kind of like
| how people say "follow your passion" but realistically this
| approach only works for a a very tiny percentage and rest
| just struggle to pay their bills. But I am sure some projects
| out there must have taken this middle path. It would be
| interesting to know how it worked out for them.
| mixedCase wrote:
| "Sharing stuff you want to share with other people is for
| suckers"
|
| Ok man. I mean, I'm quite capitalist myself but I draw the
| line before "don't share things with everyone because sharing
| free things like that is for suckers/commies/whatever".
|
| If you don't like doing open source, don't do open source.
| There was never a requirement for you to do open source.
|
| Doing open source doesn't mean tending to other people's
| feature request, or even looking at pull requests. It's just
| releasing code under a certain list of licenses. Which you
| can do, if you want to, or don't. If you want to discriminate
| between your users, you do you, that's not open source but
| unless you run afoul of the law you can go and do that.
| dabockster wrote:
| > "open source" is for suckers
|
| First time I've heard that on HN ever. This needs to be
| common knowledge so more people realize how valuable they
| really are.
| throwkeep wrote:
| So true, it's really taken for granted. Especially these days
| with Github and package managers which make it so easy to end
| up incorporating a dozen or more 3rd party libraries. There's
| something impersonal about it, and trivializes the amount of
| sweat that was poured into the code you're npm installing.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I feel like Github and co could do a LOT more to help open
| source project maintainers and contributors rewarded.
|
| They can offer a new subscription model for people with
| expendable income and companies with benefits, on a per user
| basis instead of a per project one.
|
| They can offer monetizing issues, e.g. promoting a question or
| issue report with an X amount of currency.
|
| OS maintainers can create a bot that asks people to contribute
| financially or to reach out to their employer to do so.
|
| Github can push their sponsors program more, and aim it at
| companies / "enterprise" sponsors.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Monetizing issues would be a great move.
| llaolleh wrote:
| These are great ideas. You should shoot the higher ups an
| email and a link to the thread.
|
| Your suggestions seem like a win win for Github and the
| hardworking OSS maintainers.
| lolsal wrote:
| A counter-argument to these ideas is that because it's open
| source, I'd just fork whatever I wanted to use and re-host
| somewhere else.
|
| Maybe if it was an optional and project-oriented patreon-
| style?
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| Sounds like you've got some ideas. That's cool. Take a risk
| and try to run with some of your ideas. Maybe you can help
| them grow legs.
|
| You could just leave it up to somebody else to solve, but if
| you've got viable ideas, give it a shot.
| jiofih wrote:
| > there needs to be a way of getting paid
|
| You said you worked on the library _at Intel_. Doesn't that
| qualify as getting paid for your work?
|
| That's not the usual setup when developers talk about getting
| paid for their OSS contributions, usually off the clock, so its
| not clear what the lesson is here besides politics/resourcing
| at big co (which is a real but distinct problem).
|
| This situation was supposed to be where OSS shines - instead of
| a dedicated team subject to the will of a single private
| corporation, a project should have multiple contributors,
| working on their employers' time - then there is no central
| team to be disbanded.
| op00to wrote:
| Not always. Might be a personal project.
| unreal37 wrote:
| It was an Intel project. https://github.com/intel/hyperscan/
| watwut wrote:
| Based on FOSS surveys I have seen, majority of OSS
| contributions are paid for that way. The off the clock for
| free contributions are smaller part of it all.
|
| I think the off-the-clock long term OSS maintenance is rare,
| because it is actual work. And contrary to stereotype, no
| matter how passionate you are, you will burn out if you work
| two full time jobs at the same time.
| mellavora wrote:
| Need to justify the time spent on it to management.
| glangdale wrote:
| Fair enough - my complaint is a bit too compressed. The point
| here is that my experience at Intel led me to realize that
| corporate OSS users will take your library _in secret_ and
| not even tell you - much less publicly acknowledge it, much
| less contribute or help support it. Obviously I 'm not
| expecting to be paid extra while at Intel because folks are
| using a library.
|
| It's just rather discouraging from the perspective of working
| on anything else OSS as an independent developer - unless
| it's a pure passion project. Given that the stuff I'm
| interested in often tends to wind up being hauled into high-
| performance infrastructure that's kind of important to
| bigcos, it's a bit depressing.
|
| The whole multiple contributors thing is a great theory and
| works for some high-gloss, high-profile projects. There's a
| huge tail of OSS where the expertise just isn't there and
| most companies just want to free ride.
| [deleted]
| barrkel wrote:
| > _You said you worked on the library at Intel. Doesn't that
| qualify as getting paid for your work?_
|
| It just shifts the problem along; instead of getting paid,
| you need to justify to Intel why they should pay you. Showing
| that you're keeping customers happy, building Intel brand
| value etc. can be part of that, but only if they give you
| feedback.
| unreal37 wrote:
| You didn't have any way of knowing who was using your library?
| Any way of communicating with them? A survey even? Download
| numbers?
| glangdale wrote:
| Once it's up on Github and out there, you don't really have
| any control. It's not like we were keen to put big barriers
| on the 'try it out' side. I didn't have some mad keen quest
| to be able to communicate to management "hey, someone from
| A----- or H----- _downloaded_ our library ". That's not that
| interesting. A lot of people kick the tires.
|
| What I _did_ kinda want to know is if a major Intel customer
| put our library into production. Sometimes we figured this
| out by detective work - e.g. one of our staff had a bunch of
| custom standing google searches hooked up to an RSS feed that
| would often find big vendors handing out paraphrased versions
| of our documentation to explain which regex patterns were
| supported.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I was recently shocked to discover that sindresorhus, one of
| the most prolific oss devs of all time (I think), only has
| around $14k/yr of app revenue. It sounded like he was saying
| that it was a majority of his income, so I pressed him how he
| could possibly live on it. He said he had GitHub sponsorships
| and open collective donations, and then mentioned he was living
| in a country with low expenses.
|
| I ended up feeling... amazed, really. I was going to say sad,
| but if the most prolific oss dev can't make more than an entry
| level salary from 2008 on community support alone, it's not sad
| -- it's simply how it is.
|
| People need to think of open source as something they do for
| themselves. I put stuff out for people to use. You don't like
| it, you can use something else. I try to give as much help as I
| can, but only because it makes me happy to do that.
|
| The recipe for burn out is, you're not putting yourself first.
| You should! Most people do open source the way a jazz pianist
| does a jam session on the weekends, but it sounds like your
| typical jazzist (jazzer?) ends up happier than most of us. It's
| worth taking a hard look at why.
|
| Don't do it to yourself. Life's worth more. I understand why
| they left a lengthy apology here, saying "I let the community
| down" and such, but it's just not true. Everyone who makes
| their code available for others isn t a letdown -- you're a
| hero to 12yo me, who would've given anything to get a glimpse
| of any closed-source gamedev engine. That's what OSS is all
| about: letting people build on your work, not working yourself
| to death for other people.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| It seems that he isn't really trying to make more money.
| Maybe I'm misinterpreting his words from his site:
|
| https://blog.sindresorhus.com/answering-
| anything-678ce562379...
|
| > How do you make a living if you don't have a job and don't
| take donations?
|
| > I don't make a living, currently. I have some money saved
| up. I don't really care much about money or material things,
| don't use much money, and don't have a lot of monthly
| expenses.
|
| > Do you enjoy being homeless?
|
| > Definitely. It's nice being free to travel anywhere at any
| time. I don't really care much about material stuff either,
| so I have everything I need and care about in a small
| backpack.
|
| > How to be rich?
|
| > You don't want to be rich -- You want to be happy.
| sebastianhoitz wrote:
| Totally agree! That's why I want to help open source
| maintainers monetize the ecosystem they have built. The first
| step: Sell add-on products/plugins/tools with a super easy
| Checkout paywall: https://basetools.io
| epmaybe wrote:
| Feels like a great opportunity for Github or another website to
| have these sort of analytics. Seems like quite the complicated
| task tho. Start small?
| mdtusz wrote:
| Rather than centralizing on GitHub, this seems like something
| that could be well suited as a `.well-known` url
| websites/companies could use, then anyone/everyone could
| aggregate or just inspect what is being used.
| [deleted]
| jcadam wrote:
| A lone developer can not maintain more than one or two open
| source projects at a time. I know for me, if I don't see any
| traction at all in the community once I get a project to some
| sort of MVP state, I will lose interest and move on. My github
| has many dead 1.0 projects :)
| altf4 wrote:
| I agree. I've been working on a Go library for 8 years now that
| I'm sure is used by quite some people and companies, and I've
| been close to burnout and letting it go at least twice. I'm
| super happy when people just "Buy me a coffee"--not for the
| coffee but for the feedback you get that someone is using your
| project, so it's valuable for someone. I'm very grateful for
| that, even without financial support.
|
| I think GitHub should really have a way for users of your
| repository to somehow illustrate that they're using your
| project. Maybe that'd even help to get into contact with your
| users and the companies building solutions on top of your
| product. Maybe it's just me, but I often feel blind to how and
| where your project is being used.
|
| EDIT: Typo.
| indigochill wrote:
| > I think GitHub should really have a way for users of your
| repository to somehow illustrate that they're using your
| project
|
| I kind of use forking that way (although more when I like a
| project, it's not necessarily a promise that I'm using it
| anywhere). This ensures that I have a copy of the project in
| the state that I originally liked. Then if the project is
| either (a) taken in a disagreeable direction or (b) deleted,
| I still have my local copy. I can also always update from
| upstream if future development occurs that I want to benefit
| from.
|
| That said, I don't fork all the open source packages I use,
| although maybe I should.
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| There are a lot of facets to open source contributions. One
| big facet is the whole itch-scratching thing. If you know
| longer itch, stop scratching. That's ok. Maybe when you stop
| scratching, it will start to itch again for you or for
| someone else. If nobody steps up, it just means it doesn't
| itch enough.
|
| Abandonware is not such a bad thing. It served its purpose
| for a season, then the world moved on. Nobody's out there
| trying to breath life into the Apollo program. Or into
| Mosaic. And that's ok. It doesn't diminish how awesome they
| were at the time.
| rileytg wrote:
| This applies well for things like a java package where the
| itchy generally have the skills to scratch. I think of
| these things as having numerous benefits, namely saves your
| company/team time; most of the time, in this case I think
| boo-hoo if the person working tirelessly for no
| compensation stops doing that... Pay them or do it
| yourself. (I am currently doing-it-myself with an abandoned
| java package my team relies on.)
|
| However, this logic fails for situations where the itchy
| often aren't capable of scratching. For example, a
| wordpress plugin. In this case, I think it's a grey area.
| Maybe users should have to pay since they can't write it
| themselves. But that attitude would still fail for
| situations where a library is widely used and security
| patches would be for the "greater good".
| thefunnyman wrote:
| In such a case, maybe Wordpress themselves should extend
| some engineering capacity for maintaining popular OSS
| plugins for their ecosystem.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| There's also libraries that are simple enough that they
| just work fine without constant updates. I have numerous
| libraries that I use that haven't had commits pushed for 2+
| years. This is the other aspect: burnout is so rampant
| because it feels like it never stops and you can come up
| for air.
| bin_bash wrote:
| The hard part of OSS management is dealing with change
| requests. Something comes in and now it's on the maintainer
| to ensure that the new fix doesn't break anything existing,
| or the new feature doesn't collide with anything else that
| comes down the pipe later. It's not work that can be done
| by volunteers, it's something that can only be done by
| long-term maintainers.
|
| When I worked on an OSS project I hated getting PRs. They
| usually wouldn't work for one reason or another and I would
| have to explain why they were problematic. It took a lot of
| time out of my day--I would rather people just submit bug
| reports and feature requests.
| fourthark wrote:
| Also it hurts all around to tell a hopeful contributor
| that their code isn't good enough.
|
| Yes, with hours of effort you can make your review
| relentlessly positive and constructive, but then it still
| hurts and they probably don't have the ability to fix it.
|
| You'll have to fix it for them, which is often harder
| than writing it from scratch.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > I've been close to burnout and letting it go at least twice
|
| Why don't you? That's how you get people to step up.
| umvi wrote:
| > I think GitHub should really have a way for users of your
| repository to somehow illustrate that they're using your
| project.
|
| Well "stars" are kind of like that. Also the insights page
| tells you how many times your repo is being cloned per day,
| so that's one metric you can use to see how "used" your
| project is. You can also search GitHub for the name of your
| project and see how many other projects are cross referencing
| it.
| dkersten wrote:
| The problem with stuff like stars or even lists of "who
| uses this" is that they need to be refreshed every so
| often. Just because someone used your project ten years
| ago, doesn't mean they're using it today. Maybe a list with
| a "latest update" date and gently asking and reminding
| people to update it each year if they're still using the
| project would help...
|
| As for cloning, I don't clone projects I use every day.
| Maybe I cloned them once a year ago. Maybe I'm using a
| package from somewhere and not interacting with your repo
| at all.
|
| The cross-referencing sounds like a useful metric though,
| at least for open source use, but many projects are more
| useful in non-open-source environments (eg how many open
| source projects are using something like http://riemann.io/
| ?)
| toastal wrote:
| The social stars aspect of GitHub is what makes it toxic. I
| would support more visibility for open, not centralized
| initiatives like humans.txt and contribute.json
| (https://www.contributejson.org/).
| jeffasinger wrote:
| One thing you may encounter is that a large company may be
| using it for many things internally, and that still shows
| up as just a handful of clones, because they have some
| central artifact caching service in place.
| scrps wrote:
| It would be nice to have a similar system to the language
| metric at the bottom of a repo, have something like a
| library metric that list what external libraries a project
| uses and feed those metrics back to the maintainers.
| nitrogen wrote:
| GitHub does show a dependency list in the sidebar for
| some projects.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Unfortunately, they don't have dependency plugins for a
| bunch of popular languages. Even languages with well-
| structured dependency tracking like Rust.
| gkilmain wrote:
| "stars", at least from my perspective, doesn't map to
| usage. I've stared plenty of projects I don't use. I like
| the latter two metrics - thank you for sharing!
| leejoramo wrote:
| I am afraid that within GitHub I mostly use stars as a
| bookmark for projects I find interesting and may want to
| check out in the future.
|
| If I fork a project I am more likely to actually be using
| it, although in fact I have plenty of forks from simply
| evaluating or playing with a project
| andrenatalbr wrote:
| Github allows any repo owner to adda donation button. That
| should be a more widespread practice.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| What's the library, out of curiosity?
| usrusr wrote:
| In the Java world we have the Maven repository dependency
| aggregators like mvnrepository.com that accidentally serve as
| some kind of citeseer equivalent. I assume similar things
| exist for the package managers of other languages as well?
|
| But obviously most commercial usage remains invisible. I
| could imagine a hybrid cultural/technological approach were
| dev teams publish/are allowed to publish at least usage
| metadata were they can't publish source (or actually
| contribute).
|
| There's a huge tie-in with security, I remember heated
| discussions were one side tries to establish this as an audit
| mechanism ("how vulnerable is product x really, in terms of
| outdated dependencies?") and incentive for updating, while
| the other side is crazy scared of punishing a list of
| potential attack surfaces. Perhaps the implied attribution
| benefit should become part this discussion as well?
| josephg wrote:
| For javascript packages, npm lists which other packages
| which depend on any given package, and how many times a
| package was downloaded in the last week. That gives you a
| rough sense of usage, but it can also be super mysterious.
|
| As an example, here's a package I wrote which I haven't
| touched in 3 years: https://www.npmjs.com/package/jumprope
|
| There are no projects on npm which depend on this, and yet
| it gets downloaded about 3000 times per week. Who's using
| it? I have no idea. Are they running into any problems? I
| suppose not, I mean, there aren't any issues on github. Its
| kinda spooky.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Rope took 5610 ms. 0.001122 ms per iteration, 891k
| iterations per second JS toString took 3463 ms.
| 0.003463 ms per iteration, 288k iterations per second
|
| I guess you have a typo there in total time?
| usrusr wrote:
| Thanks, just like I expected. Hopefully every at least
| remotely modern dependency/package manager has some sort
| of citeseer equivalent in its ecosystem.
|
| And your last paragraph nicely illustrates the blindness
| we get from closed projects/products not publishing their
| dependency metadata. I suppose that for client side js a
| tiny subset of usage stats could be generated by CDN
| distribution, but repackaging is a thing (and for good
| reason, in many cases)
| ratww wrote:
| You can possibly find some users in Github: https://githu
| b.com/search?q=jumprope+filename%3Apackage.json...
| ianwalter wrote:
| I really wish GitHub would invest more in the dependency
| graph, like allow you to sort by stars at least:
| https://github.com/josephg/jumprope/network/dependents
| josephg wrote:
| Oh good idea! It looks like Github also tracks a
| project's dependancy tree explicitly, though those 3000
| downloads per week remain a mystery:
|
| https://github.com/josephg/jumprope/network/dependents
| ianwalter wrote:
| I've heard that the vast majority of those downloads are
| from CI systems. It would be cool if GitHub could draw
| anonymous metrics from GitHub Actions and help with this
| mystery.
| usrusr wrote:
| Oh, that scenario, retreating corporate sponsor would probably
| not have retreated if only usage was more visible, that must
| have been very frustrating. Almost seems as if the odd
| occasional visibility boost from some heavy bug or exploit
| could have saved it. Were Oscar Wilde and PT Barnum secretly
| open source visionaries?
| glangdale wrote:
| One thing I found immensely frustrating was that occasionally
| other projects at Intel (not mentioning names) would wind up
| completely fucking up by, say, building the wrong thing, then
| they would do some heroic 8-week "save" of the mess that they
| made, and wind up getting Major Corporate Recognitions.
|
| A bodgy, high-touch system that required endless
| customization and lots of meetings would become a high
| profile project that could ultimately get the corporate
| equivalent of high fives all around. Meanwhile, if you ship a
| library that Just Works, people quietly link it into their
| product and move on with their lives.
| pkaye wrote:
| That has been my own experience too. The heroics to fix
| messes are given more recognition than a properly run
| projects. One company would actually give quarterly awards
| be those who did heroics.
| usrusr wrote:
| Sorry to hear that, I was hoping that my "no such thing as
| bad publicity" musings were merely crazy what-ifs, not a
| reflection of your reality.
| tester34 wrote:
| that's why telemetry is imporant
|
| If I were doing serious OSS I'd really hard consider adding
| just something like a once-a-week ping just to be aware of
| users count
|
| ofc with an ability to disable it
| glangdale wrote:
| SaaS or something explicitly that people know will 'phone
| home' is one thing, but putting unexpected telemetry into a
| _library_ would be staggeringly unprofessional.
| wrycoder wrote:
| There is the Debian popularity contest: popcon.debian.org ,
| which tracks how many Debian users have a given package
| installed.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Well your comment is meaningful but you could still have
| recorded the total number of downloads and the monthly number
| in order to answer how popular is the library.
| darau1 wrote:
| Or, if you can't give the dev some money, or a thank-you, fix
| it yourself. I think that's supposed to be the point of open
| source.
| lumost wrote:
| For a while Open Source was a great way to project skill onto
| employers, and employers reaped recruiting benefits for having
| a large open source portfolio. This extended to the point that
| companies would accept internal inefficiency to support an open
| source release of a portion of their code. This has detectably
| changed in the last 5 years or so as getting a top project on
| github has both become more difficult as well as a more common
| bragging right. Everybody has some open source, so the marginal
| benefit to a company of releasing another project is low.
|
| It would be great if there was a method for privately tracking
| who uses what libraries so that the marketing/support model
| could be used. Tons of companies use Tensorflow to run on TPUs,
| but Google doesn't know if tons means 90% of their cloud
| customers or 5% ( unless they put library tracking directly
| into the TPU which ... is possible)
|
| I'd love to see a feature on Github for tracking dependents of
| a project. I'd also bet that most major firms would be willing
| to allocate a small funding level to ensure that lynchpin
| dependencies such as OpenSSL, git, maven and other projects
| remain viable - after all it's probably cheaper than migration
| later!
| lamontcg wrote:
| I'd really like GitHub to have the option of open sourcing your
| work but both being able to turn off pull request and be able
| to limit PRs and issues to trusted contributors. Open source /
| closed contribution on an individual level.
|
| I like the project I'm working on now, but if I release it
| publicly I don't want to deal with 98% of the possible users.
| I'm mostly worried about the idea that the itch I want to
| scratch will turn out to be popular, because open source is
| mostly horrible.
| gamerDude wrote:
| I'm curious. Is there a reason to not build in some sort of
| ping for the software being used? Essentially doing analytics
| for open source usage so you can monitor how many people use
| it?
|
| Obviously there are some potential privacy issues here, but
| adding it to the README and doing a single ping on use seems
| like not too bad a compromise to keeping open source projects
| alive.
|
| It won't be 100% accurate due to offline use or available to
| many open source software projects due to their use case, but
| most applications would probably connect.
| spockz wrote:
| Generally apps that send telemetry get a lot of flak here.
| Even if mentioned in the docs/faq.
| j1elo wrote:
| Maybe an easy solution is to do the thing everybody seems to
| discourage: add a clause to your preferred OSS license, stating
| that usage of the code is subject to sending a mandatory thank-
| you email.
|
| That change alone might be enough to break the fragile
| conditions that allow the license to be considered Open
| Source... but who cares, the mental health and happiness of OSS
| devs affected by the difficulties mentioned in here is more
| important than the technicalities of what could happen by a
| small clause addition.
| okareaman wrote:
| It seems like some open source maintainers need to learn the
| power of "no" and how to say it without guilt. My life improved
| when I learned I could say no without explanation. Like everyone
| says whenever this topic comes up, you don't owe anyone anything.
| eplanit wrote:
| I have a lot of sympathy for developers like this, and this kind
| of story is too common.
|
| It seems like a problem that could be turned into opportunity. If
| one's software is becoming that popular, and the demands for
| changes so many that it's too much -- why not try to monetize it?
| Let the current version stay open source, and create
| customization and support for a fee. It could make the effort
| worthwhile, and could even grow into a business.
|
| Consumers in the foss world need to understand that getting their
| wishes fulfilled isn't necessarily going to be free. They might
| be asked to pay; or, they have the option to fork their own
| branch.
| allochthon wrote:
| As a user of other people's popular open-source projects, I
| generally lack awareness of the effort and investment of time
| that the maintainers put into the projects. It's always eye-
| opening and helpful for me to see posts like this, because I
| gradually take their work less for granted.
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