<story><title>FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/open-source-developers-burnout-low-pay-internet-2022-3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FooBarWidget</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m an open source maintainer. I have a different take. Yes many projects lack funding, but I&amp;#x27;m hesitant to ask for funding for my projects. Because: what sort of social contract would it imply if people fund me? Should funders be elegible for faster response times? Should their feature requests be implemented with more priority, or must they guaranteed to be implemented? What are the expectations of me? Can I take an extended holiday and go offline for a while? None of this is well-specified.&lt;p&gt;One can argue that funds are donations and thus are free from attached strings, but psychology doesn&amp;#x27;t work that way. Funders will feel entitled to &lt;i&gt;something&lt;/i&gt;, but what? You can see this pattern more obviously in Patreon: donors get something in return, such as faster access to content. So even though it&amp;#x27;s a &amp;quot;donation&amp;quot;, people psychologically still experience it as a trade.&lt;p&gt;With Phusion Passenger, I&amp;#x27;ve commercialized a open source project. The contract is clear: if you pay then we both know exactly what to expect from each other.&lt;p&gt;Formalizing the expectations to funders of my other open source projects, effectively turns those projects commercial. But to me, the appeal of my other projects is just that I can code on my own leisure, as a hobby, and give a gift to the community at the same time. It sucks that I have very little time for that because I work on those projects in my free time only, but I&amp;#x27;m hesitant to turn those projects into &amp;quot;work&amp;quot; where I have to give guarantees in return for money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>evanelias</author><text>Very well said.&lt;p&gt;I maintain an open source project which is used by a few hundred companies, and I also sell a couple commercial products which enhance the functionality. I don&amp;#x27;t accept donations since I much prefer to offer well-defined commercial products instead of ill-defined donation benefits.&lt;p&gt;Despite this, I&amp;#x27;ve still had users who insist I should accept donations, often claiming that I would make some absurdly unrealistic amount of money if I did so. In one case the user kept arguing with me and demanding to know more reasoning as to why I didn&amp;#x27;t want to accept his donation. Of course these same users are absolutely not interested in the well-defined paid products and always offer weird mental gymnastics as to their thinking.&lt;p&gt;I just can&amp;#x27;t relate to or understand this behavior. Do these people burst into random businesses in real life and say &amp;quot;Hello, I love your store but don&amp;#x27;t want to buy any of your products! I demand to know why don&amp;#x27;t you have a GoFundMe?&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/open-source-developers-burnout-low-pay-internet-2022-3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FooBarWidget</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m an open source maintainer. I have a different take. Yes many projects lack funding, but I&amp;#x27;m hesitant to ask for funding for my projects. Because: what sort of social contract would it imply if people fund me? Should funders be elegible for faster response times? Should their feature requests be implemented with more priority, or must they guaranteed to be implemented? What are the expectations of me? Can I take an extended holiday and go offline for a while? None of this is well-specified.&lt;p&gt;One can argue that funds are donations and thus are free from attached strings, but psychology doesn&amp;#x27;t work that way. Funders will feel entitled to &lt;i&gt;something&lt;/i&gt;, but what? You can see this pattern more obviously in Patreon: donors get something in return, such as faster access to content. So even though it&amp;#x27;s a &amp;quot;donation&amp;quot;, people psychologically still experience it as a trade.&lt;p&gt;With Phusion Passenger, I&amp;#x27;ve commercialized a open source project. The contract is clear: if you pay then we both know exactly what to expect from each other.&lt;p&gt;Formalizing the expectations to funders of my other open source projects, effectively turns those projects commercial. But to me, the appeal of my other projects is just that I can code on my own leisure, as a hobby, and give a gift to the community at the same time. It sucks that I have very little time for that because I work on those projects in my free time only, but I&amp;#x27;m hesitant to turn those projects into &amp;quot;work&amp;quot; where I have to give guarantees in return for money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Mc91</author><text>This is a take I have seen and don&amp;#x27;t hear often.&lt;p&gt;I depended on a FOSS project once that was mostly done by one maintainer, and would sometimes send feature or fix patches upstream.  Once I sent an e-mail that I could give him hundreds of dollars for some bug bounties - his program would improve and he would make some money out of it.  He said thanks but no, he made enough in his day job and only had limited time to maintain the program.</text></comment>