If you have a hobby project like writing a blog, crocheting, or almost any other creative hobby, you can dip in and out however it suits you. If you deal with major life events, sicknesses, etc., you can leave the hobby and come back. Nobody is paying you for it, so nobody can complain (maybe the friends who miss you, but it's not actively impacting the real world).
Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.
It's like if you loved crocheting, but somehow if you stopped crocheting everyone in your city would no longer have clothes and need to walk around naked.
When I was a kid, we always had New Year's (read: Christmas) decorations (the maximum that wouldn't be out of place in a mostly Muslim country) on a small park in my neighborhood. One year they never appeared, and people were enraged.
The guy the city hired every year had a mob in front of his door. People's letters to the authorities got no answer, so suddenly he apparently became their contact person. I was buying snacks in a nearby shop. I went out when I heard people shouting. They were shouting accusations at a guy who must have just appeared before his door because he was wearing pajamas in that cold weather.
"You Islamists will ruin this country! [0]
Happy with what you did? My children actually cried!"
and so on.
He calmly answered: "This is something I did on my own. This year I got a cancer diagnosis, so I didn't have the motivation. Sorry!"
Him feeling the need to apologize always comes to my mind when I see the toxic comments on their unpaid work that the open source maintainers feel that they need to respond to.
[0]: Well, they did ruin the country. But that's another story.
That sounds almost surreal. Pretty wild how my model of society doesn't account for this.
Istanbul / Turkey.
Plus code for the park: 326F+73J Beşiktaş, İstanbul, Türkiye
And the expectations
- People asking for and always expecting new patterns and colors.
- Raise hell if you miss a few superficial stitches and demand immediate patch work.
- No exit path without complaints. If you find it unsustainable and ask for help with the cost of materials for the *next* batch while the current batch is still out there and works fine, you are blamed for (literal) rug pulling.
and nobody is willing to pay for it.
The value created vs value captured equation of OSS must be one of the most lopsided things ever.
If you’re at Google and invent Kubernetes you might still capture 0.000001% (probably less) of the economic value created by Kubernetes, but you probably enjoy very generous comp.
OSS doesn’t have any of that, besides being extremely in demand as a consultant or whatever.
> besides being extremely in demand as a consultant or whatever
Not necessarily. AI has significantly reduced the marketability of that angle, when people can just ask AI about your OSS project.
That is to say, it's only getting more lopsided.
Sure, but I also feel like at the higher level, you’re not necessarily looking for implementation alone, but for “what should we be doing in the first place?”, which AI can’t help with
In the past it kinda worked out, because the code of OSS acted as the portfolio of the developers, who would get hired by big corps. (Today with LLMs you have no way of knowing who was the original author)
We definitely do not pay enough for the utility we get from OSS. But on the other hand do we want do copyright in code? Also when you pay for something you can hold liable the vendor if things go south (security holes etc). Do we want the devs of OSS to be in such position?
In a way it’s good that the equation is so lopsided. A massive part is that software can be replicated infinitely for free. This is why the scale of the value created is so giant.
I definitely do think it’s crazy that someone whose software gets dozens of millions of downloads A DAY can end up making less than someone building a mediocre SaaS app and getting acqui-hired 2 years later.
For the record, I think the VC - Startup ecosystem is incredibly valuable. But it IS crazy how essential software can go essentially unrewarded.
Wouldn't one be able to tell from basic research if a project is legit or not. E.g. looking how the developer handles support?
If no HM does take OSS work into account, one other reason for publishing my code goes away. Might as well post it as freeware if I want to share it.
We bumped into this at one point looking to switch our Rust GUI framework and found the best alternatives also suffered a core issue because they both (and almost all Rust GUI frameworks) depended on the same `winit` crate. The `winit` maintainer seemed massively under water.
We wrote about it: https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop
Honestly, I don't know if open source works outside of a few massive projects any more.
I wrote recently about bringing back my open source project back from the dead. It's more than a decade old. Many life events occured during that time. It's tough. It's nothing like Lodash but honestly these things ebb and flow. It operates in cycles just as life does. Wish him all the best. Sounds like he had many tough years personally and I can relate.
https://go-micro.dev/blog/27
There’s only so many sprints you can do back to back to back… you are correct, things ebb and flow and they’ll relax and life will happen and they’ll come back and either pick it up or start a new. It’s OK. It’s all OK.
I find the term "burnout" in context of FOSS quite infuriating, as it is usually being used to invalidate a real problem.
Instead of talking about concrete misbehavior by concrete individuals or institutions, "oh that poor guy is suffering from foss burnout" is thrown in, and instantly, any thought or action that might change anything about the situation is stopped and discarded.
It depersonalizes a problem that is _very_ personal.
Diffusing responsibility to no one, while at the same time reframing valid logical callouts as emotionally driven nonsense that can be ignored.
__
In essence, "FOSS Burnout" is this hybrid between victim blaming and blaming the universe, while in reality it's a real person at that very moment doing something unethical to another human being.
We need to stop talking about useless higher-level concepts and start talking about concrete bad behavior that could be instantly stopped.
__
If you've read "it diffuses responsibility to no one" and thought "oh, hey! corporate! Asscovering!", then yes. You got it. That's why this trope keeps coming up.
It's no grassroots thing.
It's engineered to keep the meat grinder running. Nothing else.
And the worst part is that it shows up even without corporate involvement, because it seeped into the defaults people apply without thinking.
I think you are doing the post injustice by hijacking it. FOSS maintainers can get a burnout even without toxic users - hard deadlines and the understanding that people really rely on your project can do that to you.
e.g.: About 25 years I had developed some blogging software in the style of usemod (single executable, data stored in ./data) for coordination of and reporting about protests on throwaway VMs. This initially was a weekend project but spiraled out of control when it made its way through Europe and people called me for setups or features for other actions. My burnout was the result of trying to help grass root organizations while also being politically active myself and having a full time job. The solution was basically what the article says:
* invited more maintainers by dumbing down the implementation so that one does not need a black belt in perl to hack on it
* created minimal docs
* I found hoster in the scene who was competent and willing to do pro bono hosting in exchange for me being available in case of problems (he never called me).
> This conversation was initially just a phone call, but was so powerful that we decided to turn it into a blog and share the audio via YouTube
i can tell - it looks like the blog post doesn't really add anything over a direct transcript of the call itself. it's just a bland summary of the really interesting story Dalton told
It's also likely an AI generated blogpost over the original content.
So does this mean no Lodash 5?
I had an open source project (https://github.com/dheera/rosboard) that I burned out and didn't really do a good job continue maintaining.
* I was burned out from work politics at the same time, and had to prioritize fighting those work politics since that's what was paying me. By the end of each day at that company, I didn't feel like staring at a screen any more
* I would get a flurry of poorly-tested pull requests that would break it for some users
* I got lots of suggestions of <feature to implement> which weren't well thought out for how to generalize
* No actually good engineer stepped up to say "I want to help with this"
* There was a commercial alternative that had gotten funding and they were better at marketing
This is unironically why the AGPL3 is the best license. No need to worry about "virality" or derivative works or any of that, just set it and forget it. On top of that, corporations will avoid you like the plague, ensuring that your audience is other AGPL3 users.
I am happy with the network solution AGPL provides on top of GPL. I think a new AGPL version needs to come out that addresses rewriting codebases with AI and claiming new original work.
> I think a new AGPL version needs to come out that addresses rewriting codebases with AI and claiming new original work.
I agree.
In the current state of OSS, if you AGPL something meaningful, someone else will re-slopfactor into MIT and take the credit, while being glorified for providing a more "open" alternative.
Or they just ask the AI to port your AGPL code into their proprietary codebase and not tell anyone.
Enforcement of license violations in the age of AI needs a 180.
How would you enforce that? I'm genuinely curious. It's nearly impossible to conclusively prove someone rewrote your codebase with AI.
I don't think you can, which is also why Open Source is effectively dead thanks to AI.
Open Source is a movement of people who want to voluntarily collaborate on and share software. As long as there are people who want to do that, it will continue. I don't see anyone suddenly stopping doing that just because AI exists. Lots of open source projects are banning AI contributions, yet they're chugging along just as before.
Honestly I think we're going to see a lot less AI-written code in the future, and more AI-assistance (PR reviews, documentation, security scans, scaffolding, brainstorming, test suites, etc). Example: to ship one feature for my open source project with a collaborator, we went back and forth for a month to agree on the change, test it, approve it, merge it. The code was pretty tiny. We could get more contributions faster if AI can help us tighten up that lifecycle.
As long as open source projects avoid using AI, surely? Why wouldn't they be able to reap the benefits also?
Unless they proudly claim it as they seem so keen to do
Plenty of rules and laws exist in which enforcement is difficult, and nonetheless exist. I think it’s enough to make some legal departments say no, and there are also companies stupid enough to brag about it regardless if it breaks the law.
I've used MIT almost exclusively for anything I've published, under multiple identities, and seems to work fine too. What benefit would AGPL3 give me over MIT, in terms of avoiding burnout? So far, saying "No" or not working for free for companies, been working fine as an approach so far, but always open to hearing even better approaches.
It prevents the No from ever materializing because almost no one wants to use your code to build on top of.
How am I supposed to practice saying "No" in low-stakes situations then? :|
I would tell you but I am practicing right now.
Makes sense for small tool like ls, and doesn't for things that are actually complex like the python language or sqlite.