As someone who worked for a large organization maintaining an OSS project, one issue I faced was how do you show impact? We used to have many organizations really love and use our project , but they would hardly give anything back to the project, including writing blogs where they could have shared some success stories. IMO github stars/pip downloads etc are not good metrics and these are even worser metrics in today's agentic AI world. Its so easy to fake these nowdays.

> One source of toxic behavior is entitled users.

It's hard to explain to people how insane things can get when you give away your work and time for free, in the hope that it will benefit people. Some things I've experienced:

  - People yelling at me in DM's when I didn't edit a podcast for community meetups in time
  - Alcoholics joining in on FOSS meetups because they wanted attention
  - People in the community getting spammed with crypto scams impersonating me that I had to answer to
  - My work being whitelabeled and sold to investors to raise money to the extent people accuse me of stealing from others
  - Smear campaigns making their way to my employer when I decided not to work on a particular open source project anymore
  - I gave away hardware to community members; the reward was tech support requests
  - Suicidal community members using me as a therapist (they claim I "saved their life"), followed by taking private (non FOSS) source code and giving it to to my competitors to advance their own tech careers

If you are going to get into open source communities you should go in with a plan for how you're going to deal with these kinds of things when they happen to you.

First is who is going to pay? OSS is popular because it can be adopted without any payment, removing a key piece of friction. And companies are in the business of maximizing their profits, which is often done by minimizing their expenses. Perhaps this can be implemented by the government as a tax, but then borders enter the equation, both for where businesses incorporate, and where OSS developers live, making it a nontrivial matching challenge.

But the bigger issue with payments I see is trying to allocate money to the right OSS maintainers. Once money is distributed, scams will appear pretending to be a worthy OSS project, LLMs would be churning non-stop flooding the ecosystem with knockoff projects, people will dispute contributions to take credit for the work of others, and a flood of attempts to collect payments will arrive from overseas locations where the cost of living is low and any payment can be a windfall.

My own fear is the result of the latter problem would be a disaster for OSS maintainers. The workload to collect payments, proving the contributions are worthy and not a scam, would dramatically increase the burden on OSS maintainers, in a way that could destroy the ecosystem.

Likewise, in the open-source world, after a certain number of things start depending on your work, people often say it "should be considered a public good" - which is particularly confusing because public good seems something entirely different from its other well-known definition.

I think this whole idea of "if you make something nice that other people like, you are obligated to serve people forever" is totally bogus. I (well Claude+Codex) write a lot of LLM code these days and many of the base libraries are open source. If I had to write ratatui it would take a long time. But if someone decided to bully the ratatui maintainer I wouldn't ever know. And there's no way to un-bully someone anyway.

Could we maybe invent the exact definition of this model? Because "open source" for me (and in general) is definitely not that.

Two examples:

1. Remember GitHub before free private repositories: lots of technically open source code not intended to be used by anyone besides the author, which was published only because the author don't want to pay to make it hidden. You're free to use it (given the open-source license), but neither of you have maintenance expectations.

2. GNU not only allows to sell free software, but encourages that, _even if you did not make it_. This is quite rare, to the point that it makes people angry at you when you try to sell someone's software.

There is tons of variability depending on many factors like the project complexity, usage or visibility, or the size of the community around it or the audience/userbase.

Technically, I'm an OSS developer, some of my stuff is even packaged in Debian, with a whopping 17 installs according to the package popularity contest... And I cannot say this has burnt me. I get a few bugs reports and PRs here and there and that's all. And I feel most OSS work ends-up in this category, with this report painting a far too bleak picture discouraging people from contributing.

But some projects do become popular or critical pieces of infrastructure, or both. The hobby structure is indeed completely inadequate in such cases. Such projects should not be only held by a solo or a pair of developers coding at night and doing everything.

maybe, they should be offered the possibility to make it their day job, or to have some help from developers doing this as their day job?

if you feel like the quotations in this article, e.g. this one:

> I don’t feel like working on [it] anymore. It went from being one of the most fun experiences in my life to making me feel terrible everyday.

why are you doing it? stop! go outside, go for a hike, get a bike, train for a marathon, play video games... anything but writing code you're not paid to write that is making you miserable.