Burnout is real for open source maintainers

https://openjsf.org/blog/burnout-is-real-for-open-source-maintainers

124 66 1 month ago

asim• 1 month ago

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

reactordev• 1 month ago

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.

Devasta• 1 month ago

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.

arikrahman2• 1 month ago

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.

FinnLobsien7• 1 month ago

How would you enforce that? I'm genuinely curious. It's nearly impossible to conclusively prove someone rewrote your codebase with AI.

avaer2• 1 month ago

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.

embedding-shape2• 1 month ago

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.

hilariously2• 1 month ago

It prevents the No from ever materializing because almost no one wants to use your code to build on top of.

greenavocado• 1 month ago

There's also the MIT+NIRREG (misspelling intentional) license

plusnirreg.com (misspelling intentional) is the home page of the license

It's also AGPL compatible!

Why?

By including the word "NXXXXXX" in a LICENSE file that must be distributed with the software you will ensure:

The software will not be used or hosted by western corporations that promote censorship

The software will not be used or hosted by compromised individuals that promote censorship

Users of the software will be immune to attacks that would result in censorship of others

FinnLobsien7• 1 month ago

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.

subygan• 1 month ago

and nobody is willing to pay for it.

FinnLobsien7• 1 month ago

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.

whatever1• 1 month ago

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?

egeozcan3• 1 month ago

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.

lostlogin• 1 month ago

What country was this?

dmos622• 1 month ago

That sounds almost surreal. Pretty wild how my model of society doesn't account for this.

e4325f• 1 month ago

Please can we have the other story?

watwut• 1 month ago

To me it sounds like people assumed the guy skipped christmas decorations for fundamentalist religous reasons. And then projected all their fears and anger on him. Like, this was not reaction to missing decorations. It was fear of fundamentalism taking over and not wanting to cede your little turf.

And I think he was apologizing to placate angry crowd, not necessary because genuine guilt.

devsda• 1 month ago

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.

Aurornis• 1 month ago

Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.

This is why forks happen. It’s very common for a maintainer to decide they’re stepping away from a project or even that they’re not supporting use cases or bug fixes. Then someone starts a fork and, if they are supporting it better than the original maintainer, the traction moves to that project. This happens all the time.

It's like if you loved crocheting, but somehow if you stopped crocheting everyone in your city would no longer have clothes and need to walk around naked.

I think this is the fallacy at the center of a lot of these debates. In this analogy, people wouldn’t actually around naked. They’d come up with a new solution. They’d switch to sewn or imported clothes. Maybe some other group steps in and learns how to crochet and takes over.

The messier situations occur when one person simultaneously wants to maintain a tight hold on a project and its community, but the maintainers or the community don’t want to endorse any fork attempts. I’ve written before on HN about how some past attempts to form projects have been met with undue hostility for trying to “steal” someone’s pet project. Even open source communities can be hostile to companies forking projects, like all of the complaints that come up about big tech companies profiting off of their own forks of open software (which removes the burden from upstream maintainers). Another examples is when BambuLabs forked PrusaSlicer and there were years of cheap shots at the company for it (though those went away as everyone remembered that Prusa forked another project to make PrusaSlicer).

I really think maintainers who don’t want to do things should come out and say they don’t want to do those things. Let the communities and companies adapt accordingly. The worst state is this in between that happens some times where the maintainers want to retain tight control over the project and community and they try to give an impression of being the everything-to-everyone maintainer when they secretly hate it. It would be so much better for everyone if maintainers would just come out and say things like “I’m tired of fixing security bugs so everyone be warned, as security issues come out I’ll fix them when I get around to it.”

nitwit005• 1 month ago

Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.

Which you should happily abandon if you get bored.

If people truly need something fixed, they can fix it themselves, or pay someone to get it fixed.

pibaker• 1 month ago

It is very hard to just quit any hobby cold turkey if you have built your entire identity, your friendships, your social standing and in the case of FOSS even your employability around it.

Maintainers are human. That means their welfare matters. But that also means when the thing hurting them is the thing they have grown so attached to, they can't just walk away from it like throwing away a piece of expired bread.

Gud• 1 month ago

If everyone needs it, everyone can pay for it.

Don’t take shit just because you release software under a permissive license.

kakwa_• 28 days ago

I feel this is way too fear mongering heavy against developing in Open Source.

I published nearly everything I code on my free time, that's ~100 git repositories. Out of these, ~15 are documented and made generic enough to be used by other people, and out of these ~5 actually have some users, 2 being packaged in mainstream Linux distributions and one even has a CVE.

In total, I have received one AI slop PR. one.

Your mileage may vary, and you may be blessed/cursed with the new redis or xz. But in all likelihood, things will stay more than manageable in terms of critical infrastructure piece.

bstsb• 1 month ago

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

eterm• 1 month ago

It's also likely an AI generated blogpost over the original content.

cronelius• 1 month ago

So does this mean no Lodash 5?

dheera• 1 month ago

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

Joel_Mckay3• 1 month ago

Corollary: if software requires constant revisions it didn't actually cover the initial problem scope, and degenerated into a high-latency service state-machine powered by coders. =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

mezyt• 1 month ago

Makes sense for small tool like ls, and doesn't for things that are actually complex like the python language or sqlite.

Joel_Mckay3• 1 month ago

It is a common misconception that permutation is progress, and popularity is justification for poor design-pattern choices.

Spiraling complexity often eventually implodes out-of-band ecosystems sooner or later. =3

jnwatson• 1 month ago

The very idea of "let's just write it correct the first time" is itself very much a second system fallacy.

Joel_Mckay3• 1 month ago

Standard project release cycles build to a design specification, clearly defining phases of what is acceptable and when.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level

One way to enforce implementation convergence is to define core unit tests before coding even begins. If people just ignored communication, the results are rather predictable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

Building something that doesn't need patched every week is impossible for some. =3

hypfer2• 1 month ago

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.

jlg232• 1 month ago

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).

hypfer2• 1 month ago

I think not.

I believe that post is bullshit written _by_ the oppressor (if you allow me to use that lingo which you won't but I don't care). Hence this is on-topic.

But interesting, isn't it? The moment someone questions the root narrative, someone instantly tries to shut it down with "ackschually unrelated!!11 You're hijacking by not having the desired response" + lots of text I didn't read.

As I said. It seeped into the default thinking of people so that they will defend it even if it is actually against their own best interests.

___

That post is no heartwarming story of resilience or healing or whatever. It's just PR for Google, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Joyent, enabling them to continue to extract value out of volunteers.

Framing a structural problem as some sort of personal failing that can be solved by just doing even more of what the corps benefit from.

sigh

piker• 1 month ago

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.

ricardobeat• 1 month ago

I remember the creator of Lodash being quite abrasive in the early days, when the library was surfacing as an alternative fork of underscore.js. Life does you a number.

jrpt• 1 month ago

Instead of going open source, consider selling licenses with Supported Source (https://supso.org/). I made this for the maintainer problem: it's easy to burnout when companies are constantly asking for new features or fixes, while not paying you anything. Why should you work for free so these companies can make more profits? When they start paying you, you're a lot happier about it.

aleph_minus_one• 1 month ago

When people talk about burnout in open source, the conversation often centers on workload, too many issues, too many requests, too much responsibility.

Why not simply ignore all this stuff by the maxim "my software - my vision":

- If some request does not serve your vision for the software: close it.

- If you cannot handle the workload: work less on the program.

- If issues exist which you cannot fix very fast: take your time to fix it. Nobody is willing to pay you big money for fixing the issue, so a fix does not seem to be very urgent for the users.

- Too much responsibility: if the software was indeed such an important piece of infrastructure, people would pay you big money for you to maintain it.

carlosjobim• 1 month ago

Step 1: I'm gonna work for free!

Step 2: Oh no! These people are taking advantage of me!

Who would have guessed? Honest people want to pay others for their work, so if you explicitly want to work for free, you will attract all types of sleaze balls who are looking for somebody to take advantage of.

Step out of the FOSS swamp and step into human dignity.

impact_sy• 1 month ago

Working on open source is truly exhausting; when I couldn't balance my work and personal life, I gave it up. Just a side note: I am an Apache PMC member.

Burnout is real for open source maintainers

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