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Burnout is real for open source maintainers

119 points by theanonymousone

by FinnLobsien

6 subcomments

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.

by asim

2 subcomments

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

by impact_sy

0 subcomment

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.

by aleph_minus_one

0 subcomment

> 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.

0 subcomment

by jrpt

0 subcomment

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.

by piker

0 subcomment

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.

by bstsb

2 subcomments

> 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

by ricardobeat

0 subcomment

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.

by dheera

0 subcomment

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

by cronelius

0 subcomment

So does this mean no Lodash 5?

by hypfer

2 subcomments

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.

by Devasta

2 subcomments

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.

by carlosjobim

0 subcomment

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.

by randomuser558

0 subcomment

[flagged]

by Joel_Mckay

2 subcomments

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