The foundation of modern software is cracking under the weight of burnout.
maybe spending more money on AI is the solution /s
I find it so tricky, too. With the maintainers that I see struggling, it’s rarely a lack of contributions that fucks them up, but rather a lack of maintainers. And they can’t easily onboard other maintainers, because:
- there’s hardly anyone willing to invest enough time into your project to be a particularly helpful maintainer.
- everyone’s just strangers on the internet, who may or may not want to ship malware as part of your project.
Like, I even have a friend who’s excited for a project that I’m building, but so far, they’re purely cheerleading (which is appreciated), because they do have projects of their own that they find fun, and in particular also a life outside of programming.
I do not currently struggle with maintainership (because I haven’t announced my projects anywhere publicly 🤪), but yeah, it just feels like it’s asking for a lot, if I were to try to get that friend on board. In particular also, because not many aspects of maintainership are fun.Eh. We’ve always been unpaid. I guess now everyone is noticing because tech companies make billions off of our work.
I think the burden is that Tech companies are putting in hundred of bug reports, not putting in any work and then expecting their ‘high priority’ bugs to be fixed last week, for free.
When it was the community benefiting the community, it was fine to labor for free.
Yeah, but regular users do that too. The problem is no one is willing to pay, so it’s all for fun. When it’s stops being fun, people get burnt out.
Of course. Because when we’re all the little guys and helping each other, it’s fair. Now you have trillion dollar companies making demands of your project but donating zero dollars to it, and it feel much less fair.
We’re under no obligation to bend to the demands of trillion dollar companies.
Sure. But their deves still create lots of noise in open source projects and you don’t always know where they work.
And if you don’t listen to them, they’ll use nefarious means to inject themselves into the project leadership.
True. That’s a good point.
Pay the people! I pay every time its an option even when its just complimentary with no additional features.
I don’t believe this is a new concept. IIRC, the same claim was made around 20 years ago.
I suspect these things go through cycles like everything else.
We should definitely be paying attention when the developers of critical infrastructure begin to burn out.
