<story><title>FOSS is free as in toilet</title><url>http://unhandledexpression.com/general/2018/11/27/foss-is-free-as-in-toilet.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yason</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t see the relevance. Open source developers need not be burning themselves out, they can just choose to work on what they want.&lt;p&gt;If a big company uses an open source library there&amp;#x27;s no contractual agreement that the developer must slave away for free and fix stuff for the big company. The developer, or the company that develops open source, can just essentially say &amp;quot;fuck it!&amp;quot; and do whatever they want.&lt;p&gt;Instead, the big company can take what&amp;#x27;s available. If it&amp;#x27;s not enough, they can contribute to the open source project (a wise move!), find a replacement project to ride on, or buy or write their own implementation.&lt;p&gt;Not all open source developers work for free but many do because they want to spend some of their time building something they care about. If the project has big impact sometimes the developers get hired to continue working on the software on a payroll. This is probably a win-win: the developer gets paid to do what he would be doing anyway and the company gets stability into future development.&lt;p&gt;If open source developers want to build a good, trusted brand of their software then it of course takes continuous involvement to support their users and can lead to burn-outs but that has &lt;i&gt;nothing to do with open source&lt;/i&gt;. The exact same applies to building an established brand out of proprietary software.&lt;p&gt;And that effort only makes sense in the first place if there&amp;#x27;s a chance for a significant financial payout in the end, or the developers really, really just want fame in which case they have their own priorities on how they want to resource the development.&lt;p&gt;Still, nothing to do with open source per se.&lt;p&gt;I bet a thousand-fold more developers are burning out in jobs working on proprietary software.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>playpause</author><text>“Open source developers need not be burning themselves out, they can just choose to work on what they want.
” – that sounds nice, but you must be missing something, or we would not have the phenomenon of OSS developers burning out.&lt;p&gt;The observation that people in paid jobs also get burned out doesn’t give much insight into the curious, sad reality of the experience of an OSS dev working to to the point of burnout for a constant stream of non-paying clients who are often rude and unprofessional in their interactions with you.&lt;p&gt;Open source developers can’t ‘just’ choose what they work on, anyway. There are benefits in maintaining an OSS project (exposure, satisfaction at making something that a lot of people use) but these only apply if you focus your efforts on projects that become popular, which are exactly the projects that suffer the problems discussed in the article.</text></comment>
<story><title>FOSS is free as in toilet</title><url>http://unhandledexpression.com/general/2018/11/27/foss-is-free-as-in-toilet.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yason</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t see the relevance. Open source developers need not be burning themselves out, they can just choose to work on what they want.&lt;p&gt;If a big company uses an open source library there&amp;#x27;s no contractual agreement that the developer must slave away for free and fix stuff for the big company. The developer, or the company that develops open source, can just essentially say &amp;quot;fuck it!&amp;quot; and do whatever they want.&lt;p&gt;Instead, the big company can take what&amp;#x27;s available. If it&amp;#x27;s not enough, they can contribute to the open source project (a wise move!), find a replacement project to ride on, or buy or write their own implementation.&lt;p&gt;Not all open source developers work for free but many do because they want to spend some of their time building something they care about. If the project has big impact sometimes the developers get hired to continue working on the software on a payroll. This is probably a win-win: the developer gets paid to do what he would be doing anyway and the company gets stability into future development.&lt;p&gt;If open source developers want to build a good, trusted brand of their software then it of course takes continuous involvement to support their users and can lead to burn-outs but that has &lt;i&gt;nothing to do with open source&lt;/i&gt;. The exact same applies to building an established brand out of proprietary software.&lt;p&gt;And that effort only makes sense in the first place if there&amp;#x27;s a chance for a significant financial payout in the end, or the developers really, really just want fame in which case they have their own priorities on how they want to resource the development.&lt;p&gt;Still, nothing to do with open source per se.&lt;p&gt;I bet a thousand-fold more developers are burning out in jobs working on proprietary software.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>setquk</author><text>Just as a point, I’ve helped with open source projects under commercial interest. I’ve fixed bugs and created documentation and all I got was a fuck off or silence from the maintainers.&lt;p&gt;So I don’t bother any more. Most of the time I build a new wheel that benefits no one.&lt;p&gt;Fostering a good culture requires lots of work from both sides, contributor and maintainer.&lt;p&gt;I’m not saying all projects are like this but I’ve waded into too many of these so far.</text></comment>