Open source maintainers are really feeling the squeeze Recent events have brought the plight of open source maintainers front and center, but the problems were brewing for many years. The theme cropped up repeatedly during 2025's State Of Open Conference, with speakers from tech giants and volunteer maintainers laying out the challenges. Much of the open source ecosystem relies on …
There is a simple way to get features and bug fixes to an OpenSource project. Pay IBM a pile of money and ask them to do it.
Otherwise, it's only really going to happen if a maintainer happens to have the same requirement/problem as you. Why would it? It's your problem, not their's.
I worked for a large systems shop in the early naughties; we made big servers and a unix-flavour for them.
One customer, a bank, found that a routine operation took an embarrassingly long time to produce a result.
But, because the result was produced, and the customer had not elected to take queue-jumping support, their issue could never get a severity / priority that the core developers would even see it.
So they sat for 4 years until we had a bug blitz, and it showed up. IIRC, it was resolved within a week.
That is when I started believing in open source.
But the solution is right in front of everyone, even in the article, but no one wants to acknowledge it:
"Dealing with the problem is difficult. Do maintainers simply need to be paid in recognition of their efforts? Vargas is unsure that everything has a financial solution and noted research (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3674805.3686667) presented at this year's FOSDEM. Vargas told The Register, "Money is not going to solve all problems."
Yes, YES, IT WOULD. If there was financial incentive to get involved in open source projects...more people would get involved in open source projects.
To say otherwise is either denial at the least or an outright LIE that these people are telling themselves in order to keep their free open-source projects in check (that being, no to low costs to the companies benefiting from the use of the output of these projects). And I've been saying this here, on this tech journal, for quite a while yet the denials from the industry continue.
General human nature will state that people weigh costs versus benefits and make a decision based on the outcome. Making, and keeping, "FOSS" as an (generally) unpaid project (yes, you might get a few hours of your pay, as per this article, being 'gifted' by your employer to the project, but that's just a few hours and, again, as noted, those few hours are not enough) yet allowing companies to use the project in for-profit endeavours, plus demanding user support, means that you will not get a large-scale involvement with said project. All too many people will weight the costs vs benefits and say "It isn't worth my time". Some will...but most, won't (see: topic of article).
So compensating for work? Wow, what a radical notion! 'But that won't work!', they somehow say.
Read: 'But keeping your projects 'free' (or low cost) allows us to keep our profitable business model intact and unchanged!'
This is not something that will end well. You have a society that has squeezed the worker to the utmost, telling them that money and profits are what drives ambition, society, and growth, and then on the other hand telling tech workers that their pet / useful projects need to stay "FOSS"...because. But get involved! We need more of you to slave program at the mine face to keep our systems running.
It's called cognitive dissonance. But that hasn't stopped this industry from keeping it going for as long as possible...as long as the "right" people (people higher up in the food chain, like C-suite) keep making bank off of it.
The idea of freely sharing code is as old as computing. The first computer user group (SHARE, which originally was exclusively for the IBM 704) began in 1955 and defined a card-based format for sharing software amongst the participating organisations as well as essential standards (such as linkage conventions) to make them readily reusable. Software from computer manufacturers was usually free as the computers were a hard sell without it and unless you'd bought a machine there was no way of making use of it. Copyright in computer programs wasn't really a consideration until there was a level of compatibility between computers - software was typically distributed either as assembly code or compiled object code - and the bundling of hardware and software came to be seen as anti-competitive. However, once people had to pay for software, they expected it to be maintained in a working condition in the same way as the computer itself.
The twist that the Open Source movement put on this was to make the source code freely available on request, but having thereby eliminated any commercial element from the creation of software nevertheless offered ongoing support and maintenance as a possible source of income.
We now seem to be in a situation where even that source of income has been eliminated, not by any particular law or campaign, but simply by developers capitulating to peer pressure. And having done that, they're of course finding themselves expected to serve up not only support, but also functional enhancements they don't themselves need, free of charge.
It's not only unsustainable, it's also counter-productive. It leads to developers and maintainers simply walking away and leaving projects abandoned. It also leads to the constant churn of new frameworks and re-implementations because developers prefer to move on to new things. And of course it leads to a worldwide distributed security threat because, outside a few prominent projects, no-one knows who's actually writing the code or cares what's actually in it (despite, ironically, the source being open).
If a solicitor prepares your will, you don't expect to get free updates for life. If a plumber fixes your tap, you don't expect them to come back at no cost whenever it drips in future. I'm all for developers freely sharing their code, but that altruism should not come at the cost of a future obligation: it's the recipient's job to decide whether it's useful, how to adapt it to their environment and to maintain it. That might involve paying someone (possibly the original author), but no-one should expect a free ride.
Well "free ride" is the OSI definition of open source precisely because it suits its corporate backers very well.
That clause does not say anything at all about obligating an author to actually make any future changes whatsoever. All it says is that, if you (and if you bother to distribute them - it doesn't even force you to do that) then you don't get to change the rules on anyone else.
Far from forcing everyone else to give the corporates a free ride, that clause can - and does - mean the same corporates make their own changes and then hand them over - purely in their own self-interest, because if they kept the mods to themselves they'd have to pay to re-integrate into all the later releases. So now every one gets to benefit.[1]
That is why even Microsoft makes submissions into Linux (and some commentards in the last few days have been complaining that Linux is now in the thrall of Big Corporations).
[1] yes, plenty of corporates don't do that - but they wouldn't anyway, no matter if the clause you highlit existed or not.
To emphasise the point: a corporate - and anyone else - can make mods and not submit them upstream but would then have to incorporate them into later versions. That might be no more than a recompile from source providing the relevant source file was unchanged upstream in later versions. I did that myself for years when Wine decided that 24 bit video could be treated as 32 bit (it couldn't & shouldn't and broke a lot of applications in consequence).
What alternative do you propose? Because the alternative you'll get if you remove that is that you can forbid anyone from modifying your source, which doesn't do very much to improve it, and is not easy to enforce anyway because anyone who wants is going to modify it anyway and not tell you. When you propose your alternative, consider why open source (or free/libre software or whichever term you like the most) is better than proprietary, and consider whether it would still be with your new standard.
You are the maintainer of a useful piece of FOSS software. You have a slowly increasing bug/feature backlog created by corporate employees. The chances of you being paid for doing consultancy work for these corporations is close to zero because the employees don't have the authority to pay you for it. The chances of your having code committed which fixes these bugs is also close to zero because corporate employees also don't have the authority to commit updates to your software as code done on their time is copyright by their corporation and their managers think they'll be helping the competition. All that will happen is a patch file used by that corporation will be compiled in as part of the build process (coincidently point 4 in the OSI's open source definition) and neither developer time or money is donated to your project. It's Heartbleed all over again.
An alternative would be something like FUTO's source first licence where corporations which can obviously pay have to pay.
(Didn't downvote.)
"You are the maintainer of a useful piece of FOSS software. You have a slowly increasing bug/feature backlog created by corporate employees."
No problem. I'm going to not fix any of those things unless someone I care about wants it fixed. People I care about include myself, people I like, people who did other work which I'm willing to reward with some from me, people who pay money. Otherwise, the feature will just sit there. It's that company's problem and they can solve it in many ways.
"All that will happen is a patch file used by that corporation will be compiled in as part of the build process (coincidently point 4 in the OSI's open source definition) and neither developer time or money is donated to your project."
That is not point 4. Point 4 is that I cannot stop them from modifying the software. There are three restrictions permitted for how I may restrict them, but they are allowed to modify it. Which is what I want, because people being able to modify it is how such software grows in the first place. If they never upstream changes they made, that's their choice and their problem because I won't know it exists and won't have any problem accidentally breaking it with updates on my side. I'd also be interested to know how you think heartbleed happened as a result of this given that it was an oversight in the original codebase, not something that was patched in or out of it.
OpenSSL was understaffed (I think at the time it was one full-time and one half-time person), underfunded, and yet the entire of the Internet depended on it since it was used in most servers and routers. That's how Heartbleed happened. If your idea of an enjoyable project is spending time batting away issues opened by corporate employees because you don't have the time to develop them either then go ahead, but these people can and should be contributing to your project in some real way if they find value in it in its current state and would find more value in it if the issues that they opened were addressed.
Your project doesn't grow precisely because of point 4. Patches aren't upstreamed and the corporation doesn't have to donate any money for software that it uses commercially. The AGPL goes a small way in addressing this, and even then it's a step too far for many.
What do you think about the FUTO licence?
The understaffing issue is correct, but not exactly relevant to the discussion about upstreaming things because, if people were developing patches for it, they would have lots of reasons to want them upstreamed. If nobody is doing it, that's a completely separate issue.
The FUTO license is not my favorite, and I can explain why. While it's not as bad as most faux-open licenses, it has the same central problem that they all do, just not right now. To require payment from an unclear set of people, it restricts the ability to modify and distribute modified versions. I am not allowed to remove certain parts of the code, and I am not allowed to perform any commercial activities if I'm modifying it. Why is this a problem? Here is an example. To demonstrate my problem, I will compare it to the GPL/AGPL, the other licenses they have used.
FUTO, the company, is privately owned. The code they make is owned entirely by them. This means they can change the license if they want and they can add whatever they want. Fortunately, its current owner and those who work there are public-spirited, so they make useful things without abusive features. One day, as all of these people are having a meeting, a meteor comes through and destroys the building, killing those people who were doing this. The company is inherited by someone who is not interested in the privacy, freedom, or anything else that drew people to this company. They want money, and they only have the rights to some code. So they modify the code to introduce surveillance and advertising. What can we do about this?
For projects using the GPL or AGPL, this is easy. We say goodbye to the organization that no longer has our interests at heart, and we fork the project. Someone else can continue development of the code. In fact, we can form a new organization to do that if we want. We can accept donations or even continue to ask for payment for this. This is what open source software allows. What happens with the FUTO licensed stuff? We are allowed to modify the code, but we are forbidden from removing any of the FUTO-added commercial code. Right now, that just means that we can't remove the part where FUTO asks for money nor redirect that money to ourselves, but in the world where FUTO has gone bad, that could easily include their other commercial stuff such as the advertising. But maybe we can argue that we forked before that happened, so we just have to leave in the part where people are asked to pay new-FUTO. Still, we are forbidden from acting in a commercial way, meaning it is probably impossible to collect donations or form an organization. Not only does our version, forked specifically to get away from new-FUTO, have to ask users to pay them, our users cannot help with donations or we've violated the license.
In fact, this applies even without the threat of a rogue organization. If I am writing extra code for one of their projects, unaffiliated with FUTO itself, and you want my feature added, you are not allowed to donate to me to help get that written. In practice, I'm sure they would ignore this and let me collect that donation, and I would probably still accept it because I'm that confident about it, even though my typical policy is that I don't violate the letter of the license even if I don't expect it to be enforced. They may not really know this is what their license does. It follows similar not open licenses that have been used in exactly this way as previously open source projects try to keep more of the funding to themselves, and I don't see any way that their license avoids what those licenses have done. There is a reason why people got angry when they called it open source. By the way, this doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with what they've done; it's their code, and I am perfectly happy with people making their code proprietary, so less open than I'd like is not something I object to. I still prefer something truly open to this, and those reasons are why.
> We now seem to be in a situation where even that source of income has been eliminated, not by any particular law or campaign, but simply by developers capitulating to peer pressure. And having done that, they're of course finding themselves expected to serve up not only support, but also functional enhancements they don't themselves need, free of charge.
The problem with "If you want it, pay for it," is that if you pay for it, everyone else benefits. (That's a good thing in my book.) However, people that put in the resources of paying for something generally feel slighted if everyone else gets that thing too. For commercial software, you can pay a moderate sum for the software, and put in feature requests -- or push real hard for something, and get it if enough other users are likely to want it. For example, MS office, upgraded standards in web browsers, 10-bit color depth... no one user will pay for these things, probably. However that's been the general paid-support option of open source. Commercial software has been socialized: among the users, all pay a bit, all get the features of the software. Open source is one-for-all: one person pays, everyone gets it. (Barring few large projects like Redhat and Ubuntu, where you can put in bug requests, vote for them, .... it's commercial software that is open-source.)
If getting paid for your work (as an open source developer) is the solution to much of this, we have a problem of figuring out how to actually achieve the socialized aspect of this. Users who don't have to pay, or don't care enough to pay for support (a subscription, if not purchasing features), won't. Someone who needs something is left paying for the whole thing, for anyone who wants to use it. No one is going to subscribe to 73 open-source subscriptions that they use, of typically not a low cost (which a subscription can't be, given credit card rates). What are the alternatives?
- Bug bounties -- for contributors to win? Feature bounties? (who places the bounty? Do they pay the whole bounty?)
- Shared investment pools -- for feature development? If you want this feature, invest in this pool. However it may be years before others even find out about the pool to invest, or before they need the feature, and by then maybe the original investor(s) will have withdrawn their support
- feature pricing? How does the developer decide how much a feature will cost, to either set the price of the pool, and what if they price the feature wrong? Who is collecting the pool, is it the developer, and if the dev changes the pool price can anyone ask for a refund?
Yuck.
Perhaps someone will create an open-source "projects" non-profit site, with investments, feature requests, investment pools, and etc. Maybe it's happened already, maybe it's still alive or maybe it died. It seems a little like micro-transactions from (was it Brave?). I don't think those ever really took off.
(some of who I have worked in) who depend on Open Source components and then complain about bugs or missing features. I have suggested that they pay for the bug fix or enhancement to be met with derision "who do I think they are - to pay for something that could benefit their competitors ?", or similar sentiments.
Sometimes I fave fixed a bug while being paid for them and with their approval. "Now let me send in a patch" to be told "not on our time" - so I do it when I get home.
They just do not understand that we can all move forward faster if we cooperate, payment of trivial sums (compared to what they waste elsewhere) is an anathema to some of them.
At my last place I managed once in 20yrs to get the company to pay for a fix. It cost more in effort to get approval than what it cost to get the fix done ... I wish I'd been able to sustain the momentum but management thought it was cheaper to maintain a patch set. My take was that it was way cheaper to get someone else that knows the code inside out to fix the issue once...
This can be a problem, and the best way to respond to it is to show them exactly how important a feature request is when the justification is "we want it". I've been in both positions to some extent. If a request like that has been sent to a project of mine, I'll respond if it's a security issue because I can't bear to leave that in, but if it's a feature request, then they'll get a message that it has been added to the suggestions list but I cannot guarantee when or if it will ever be implemented. They can see from the suggestions list that I'm not joking about that. They get to choose whether they do something about this.
Fortunately for me, my employers have been, while not any more generous about paying for features, at least willing for an employee to write them. If we want something bad enough, I'll make the point that the thing we're trying for may not be used by anyone else, and requesting existing maintainers to add it may never go anywhere. They are usually receptive to the suggestion that I or one of my colleagues write the thing and upstream it, which is not as good as paying a maintainer to do it, but at least it reduces the annoyance to maintainers asked to do something they have no intention of doing for free.
"move forward faster if we cooperate, payment of trivial sums (compared to what they waste elsewhere) is an anathema to some of them."
The place I work gave Linux a try a long time ago and there was a database for item tracking. Due to ISO-loads-of-numbers, everything is tracked. Stuff coming in, stuff as it's being prepared, stuff as it is being made, stuff awaiting packing, stuff that's been packed... Literally every bit of everything needs a little yellow sticky label and to show full traceability. Unfortunately the software in question had a lot of difficulty synchronising between the place I work and head office over in a nearby city. A lot of things got "lost". The company got in touch with the developer of the database and was told "you have the source, you fix it". I don't know if anybody got as far as discussing payment, maybe that didn't come up and the developer wasn't keen on unpaid support work? I don't know.
What I do know was that within the week all traces of Linux were replaced by Windows, and some company came in to see exactly what we were doing and why, and their software package was modified to meet our workflow. I'm sure this cost €€€€, but companies tend to have the attitude of if they really need something then they'll throw money at a problem just to make it go away. We're deeply into the Microsoft world now, too, using all their business tools and, well, imagine how much that cost. The database works well, but then they got a local outfit to do the software rather than some cowboys like Ellison's mob.
Perhaps better communication is needed all around? It's entirely fair that developers can say "no" if there's nothing in it for them. The work they do started as something they found interesting. Interesting isn't a euphemism for obligation. Companies don't tend to provide their services for free (those that do monetise in les obvious ways like advertising), so why should anybody expect a developer to fix this specific issue for free?
This has been an issue for years. FOSS isn't there so you don't have to pay anyone. Many of the people doing the HARD work are hobbyists or doing it out of a love of technology. Log4j showed how embedded this stuff is and how even multi billion $ corporations take advantage & just chuck modules in without testing etc.
If you're not paying support for #opensource then you've got zero right to complain, EVEN if a zero day isn't patched for a year!
No, for some important projects they are developer paid by some big company needing the software and unwillingly to pay for all the development. But they also have internal teams that can customize that software a lot for their own use, and if they don't distribute the software but just use it internally - like all the big web companies.... - under GPL they have no obligation to make their changes available to others, while they take advantage of all public development.
Than there are many others that are simply exploited by brainwashing them that FOSS should be the only way to develop and distribute software and two legs, oops, commercial software, is bad and evil. So the above company can just pay far less developers than they would need if they had to pay the full development/test/etc. And since they make money in a different way, software development needs to bend to their needs.
> Than there are many others that are simply exploited by brainwashing them that FOSS should be the only way to develop and distribute software and two legs, oops, commercial software, is bad and evil. So the above company can just pay far less developers than they would need if they had to pay the full development/test/etc
Sorry, are you trying to say that those companies are somehow brainwashing people they have no connection with, all over the world?
Open Source has been around for a long time (by computing standards), are we to believe that Microsoft was engaging in X-Files style mind control at the time of the Halloween Memo?
The Truth Us Out There.
kmorwath has some, er... interesting, views.
They seem to think that FOSS is an evil plan/global conspiracy by corporations to get indentured servants to write software for them without even knowing they are being exploited.
They were spewing similar nonsense in the comments on this article from a few weeks ago: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/04/windows_11_avoidance/
The trick with open-source was to keep things simple and fun.
Many newbies / beginners don't realize this and so chose complex tools, complex workflows, promise far too much and then ultimately can't deliver.
That's fine, hopefully once they recover they will learn from their mistakes and start smaller (i.e using C, simple build systems, pulling in less dependencies, less technical debt, etc)
There do seem to be a fair old number of GitHub entries[1] that are abandoned after little more than an initial commit with an ambitious statement of intent.
But I'm never sure how serious those were, whether they tried and then ran into a brick wall of unpreparedness or just never actually did anything at all beyond that commit (because the world and their dog never came around, excited by their idea and ready to hand over support?[2])
[1] no, can not give any URLs, never thought I'd want to go back to them! Sigh, "take notes on everything" they said, but I didn't listen.
[2] cynical old gititude coming out to the fore again.
Heh. Re note 1: I have several of those.
Those are, or at the very least were, quite serious. Cause of delay ~ absence of further activity: I know what must be done, needs to be done, however... these projects are subject to override reason #3: I regrettably must report that our highest priority, deeply funded and closely monitored research project: Making The 48 Hour Day A Practical Reality, has experienced yet another unfortunate minor setback, which is addressed in further detail in our upcoming research grant proposal which, I am sure, will pass your esteemed and valued microscopic scrutiny and squabling. Our entire team is perennially highly motivated to keep dragging humanity, kicking and screaming, onwards into the Year Of The Fruitbat. ... Or is that the Year Of The Yellow Elephant by now? Ach, nvr mnd. Send your Moolah! We are so needy!
(facepalm)
Ye Gods, FOSS suposes adult, non-disordered attitude by *all* around. Forever & always.
Talk of a Major Design Flaw. If you survive long enough. (wtf, why does this suddenly sound like marriage vows while I check my text? What were those divorce stats running numbers again? Ah. Effin' obvious, in 20:20 hindsight. ... Adds money... Check. More drama. Nailed it.)
I am not into BDSM and won't ever be, I am into FOSS. It's waaay kinkier! (yum!yum!)
I get the same burnout as a contributor to Wikipedia content, and for much the same reasons.
If you are good at what you do, some will come to rely on you and others hate you for disagreeing with their lousy shit. The pressure is on to wade through the shit and keep delivering to your following.
In commerce, you just change jobs. But altruism is not so easy to shuck off.
Take a tip from a [ boring old fart | grumpy old git | tired old cynic | hairy old hippie | insert old wisecrack of choice ]. Do yourself a favour - give your bathroom mirror a dose of that altruism. Take a break.
If it's a real showstopper and the mega-sponsors like MS and IBM wake up to that "oh, shit!" feeling, you are not their slave. It's their problem now, not yours.
Come back as, when and if you are ready.
Thanks for the pro tip. Spot on!
FOSS, I feel, is designed by Dutch calvinists: it's rather old testament biblical: help yourself so help ye gods.
Was to ask for help (yet again), but guess my lord has been kicked off by the Telco for data abuse, I don't even get His automated helpdesk menu any more, just the disconnect ridididi. ... Oww. Please tell me I didn't subscribe to a pyramid scheme! Did that mother cash in and leave, bitcoin bro style?! (It can't be me! That's impossible!)
Corrolary Moral 1: it ain't gonna fly if you're not a fellow Calvinist yourself.
CM2: when a well seasoned Dutch Calvinist says they do "charity", it means they help... a fellow Calvinist. Don't complain about it, learn from them and accept This Way Of Lif. [sic] They got psychology before it got a 4 syllable word.
Acceptance: the final stage of a sane mourning or trauma coping process. I see its nuclear pile blazing beyond the horizon. Still some way to go, alas.
----
Personally, I "fave" the word 'curmudgeon' (add adjective flavor and sprinkles to taste). Curmudgeon... It has such a nice ring to it, so fitting to this page's symphony in a minor key.
Same. Even if it's software I have paid for, if it was an inexpensive one-time payment, I don't really feel any more entitled than if it was free. And with small one-person (or small team) projects, I still feel like the developers are usually more responsive than the Microsofts of the world. I just don't get angry with them when they can't/don't fix my issue like I would with Microsoft.
"I cannot imagine the mindset of someone who gets demanding with something they're not paying for."
Perhaps a part of that particular phenomenon is that FOSS has become so good it's in many cases indistinguishable from commercial products.
Take something like LibreOffice, for example*. In most cases it has become good enough and mature enough to entirely replace MS-Office. It looks entirely professional, is rich in useful features (albeit more crap-free) and is widely used** in comparison to its commercial counterpart. In short, it does not look like something that is being developed, extended and maintained by a non profit crowd of enthusiasts. The average user, therefore, tends to hold LO to the same*** support standards as commercial products. Justified? No!! Understandable? Well, yes, if seen from the viewpoint of an average computer user.
"On the rare occasions that I file a bug report I ask nicely for a fix and am happy if the maintainer can get around to it."
Agreed. On more than one occasion I have been blown away by the quality of support received from the Kodi development community, to name one example. On at least one occason I enquired about some odd behavior that I believed might be a bug but could someone confirm or deny if that was the case? That was on a Thursday. By Friday I had a dev coming back to me promising to look into it. That evening he had confirmed that it was a bug, and by the end of the weekend the pull request had been submitted. A month later the next point release came out with the problem fixed. Try to get that from MS or IBM. But... It helps a lot if you do your best to properly explain the problem, ask nicely, and say "thank you" if someone goes out of their way to help you. But in today's world of entitlement and the loudest shouters getting the biggest bites first that has become a rare phenomenon.
To summarize: this is as much (perhaps more) a social problem than a FOSS problem.
To summarize the summary: people are a problem. (With apologies to Douglas Adams)
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* I'm not including the prime example (Linux) here, since that has various commercial offshoots that come with corporate support, SLA's and what not.
** Depending on where you are. For example, in the academic world LO is quite pervasive.
*** Same or higher - LO is better maintained than MSO in many respects; the latter simply replaces one load of crud with another between versions.
Tech companies need to start properly adopting projects. That means they hand over cash to pay coders and fund a co-ordinator. But they don't own or manipulate the project. A rule might require companies to do this for a project that is not a competitor of their own products. People 'adopt' Tigers and guide dogs, supporting them. This would be the tech industry version. The tech industry wastes enough money bribing politicians, building gimmicks and failed projects they just cancel and paying their senior executives shocking amounts. They can afford it. The number of projects they support should be a badge of honour.
Another issue is having skills spread too thinly. Too many distros. Too many similar programs. It is a poor use of limited resources.
Maybe more open source in the universities too.
I would actually like to see a new OS developed, much smaller, much simpler, and inherently more secure. Capable of working on major platforms with file compatibility, a browser with plug ins and a development package that would make it easy for independent third parties to assemble customised software from interoperable components. With one (skinnable) distro. Lots of variables to tweak to personalise it, but just the single core distro. The developing out to the components would be paid for by the tech industry. 3rd parties could build their own additional components and plug ins.
> People 'adopt' Tigers and guide dogs, supporting them
Ooh, I like that idea.
Do we get to have plush dolls[1] made of us and a monthly newsletter, with pictures of the free-range devs gamboling in a meadow whilst the build is running?
Although, hmm, guide dogs: you support those from puppyhood, paying for their training. But if we put a student through a programming course, do we get a guarantee that he'll work on the codebase we're interested in?
[1] icon - what the world probably thinks we look like (or, cough, could we have a hacker-inna-hoodie icon?)
The question is, what percentage of kernel code does Linus Torvalds maintain to justify him hoarding millions while other (would-be) contributors have to rely on welfare & food hand-outs?
If big corporations/users of open software paid there share, it would more than cover the costs for private users. Either way, I support micropayments so that each user pays in total about 5€ per month for open source. If infeasible, I support monthly one-time payments to FSF-like institutions, that are responsible for disbursement to all maintainers of important open source projects. Usually the problem isn't insufficient funds, it's lack of fair/transparent disbursement & hoarding.
"The question is, what percentage of kernel code does Linus Torvalds maintain to justify him hoarding millions while other (would-be) contributors have to rely on welfare & food hand-outs?"
I don't know. But there's no rules stopping you devising your own kernel if you're not happy with the way of the world. Just think in a few long years moFOS could have completely replaced Linux, you'd be at the head of the table, and be able to wield influence in the way you'd like.
"Usually the problem isn't insufficient funds, it's lack of fair/transparent disbursement & hoarding."
This was the same suggestion that came up when Bruce Perens came up with his post-open disaster. It will have the same problems. For the moment, I'm going to skip over the required payment bit, whether that's a good idea, how you would implement it, and how you would prevent abuse of it. Those are massive problems, and I could write at length about why, but for the moment, let's stick to only one major problem: how you allocate the proceeds after you get them.
When I make my payment, does it go just to open source code I use, or to everything? If it's only what I use, then I have to report that, but how does it get split up? Does every project get an equal share of it, from the massive program that has a hundred full-time equivalent developers on it to the library written by one person who hasn't committed anything to it in over a year (I have a few of those)? Or do we have to allocate it based on its importance or scope to me, which would probably fund complex projects more, which is probably necessary, but would be an administrative nightmare. But if we don't use my funds for code I use, but instead make a general pot, then how do we decide who gets the support? If we support everybody, then that means that plenty of funding will go to people who make open source code that isn't much used and may not be well-supported. I have a project that I think is somewhat good, but I think it's probably got about ten users worldwide. I don't know that for sure, but it mostly doesn't matter because I wrote it for myself. Do I get funding for that one? If we leave some projects out, how do we tell what counts? If we give the organization control over that, they could allocate funds to things they support and ignore projects they don't like. If we try to set a standard for size and support anything larger than that, expect that to be gamed. For example, if you only get funding if you have more than X active users, then you'll need to build in some telemetry to prove that you do, and you could get some fake users to put you over that total.
This is not the only reason why it's a bad idea, but it is certainly one of them.
"THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED"
It's all very well for people who work for Google and Microsoft to complain that their commercial businesses aren't receiving the level of support they might expect from commercial software vendors, but most open source software is not offered on those terms. It's done on a use it if you find it useful, or change it yourself to meet your own needs basis. And frankly, all the billions sloshing about in their bank accounts could buy them every bit of work they need to do that. They should be extremely grateful that work has been offered for free, and see it as a basis from which to build on rather than a finished product offered from a vendor.
"Microsoft gives no express warranties, guarantees or conditions. You may have additional consumer rights under your local laws which this agreement cannot change. To the extent permitted under your local laws, Microsoft excludes the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement"
Straight from https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-software-license-terms-e26eedad-97a2-5250-2670-aad156b654bd
This is the amazing thing. We regularly get commentards banging on about corporates can't use FOSS applications because of lack of support and yet the distinguishing feature of Microsoft support seems to be a monthly supply of apparently lottery of patches which may fix things and may break others.
Support from Microsoft? It is to laugh, ha ha.
Not even basic stuff, like a paid-for upgrade working, certainly no bloody chance to get your money back when it clearly doesn't!
I had a legit copy of Visio. Then Ms bought them out. Next release, you can get as an upgrade for less than full whack. Jolly good, here is my dosh. Installer demands that I enter my serial number, showing a very MS-format entry box.
But Visio Corp never issued me a serial number, it just came in a nice box with useful manuals, no serial number in sight. A more elegant program for a more trusting time.
Can I get my money back? Of course not, I'd opened the box and run the installer, what more did I want?!
Seethe.
You don't have to contribute, but it will always help.
Try not to worry about 'how much' - pay what you think is reasonable, or what you can afford. It should have some effect, and more importantly it begins to change the conversation that people should be paying or contributing for what they use.
It's always going to be difficult to consider paying for absolutely everything, and Bruce Perens' proposal is a non starter, but if you believe in a project or it's providing a notable benefit on a regular basis it should be pretty clear morally that some contribution is a good idea.
You are NOT a freeloader. That being said, if we want these things to be available, we should consider giving a few dollars. The only thing I have given money to in the past year is $20 to MX Linux. Not much, but if 1000 people in the entire world gave that, we would be talking about something. 10,000 would be better. We have to start somewhere :)
The subtitle precisely describes not only 'maintainers', but ALL those people who have, for years on end, happily--and very, very stupidly--taken on the responsibility of being the free lifetime-service-contract provider for friends and family who discovered that these individuals were more than happy to solve problems for free simply in order to display how smart they are.
Who are the smart ones in both these situations. (?)
[TL;DR: there is an elegantly simple solution to this nonsensical problem: it consists in saying, "That is really hard work. The solution will really cost money."]
"The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity."--Eric Hoffer
> of being the free lifetime-service-contract provider for friends and family
I really hate people like you.
Most of my friends and family can't do computer repair, solve complex issues -- and even if they took it to a computer shop all they'd get is an offer to format and reinstall the OS for $150.
You can fix the problem in under an hour, make them happy, demonstrate your skills, and have an evening or a beer or skeet-shoot or play pool afterward or whatever you like to do with your family. Is an hour, every month or so, really so terrible to you? There are of course limits, don't allow yourself to be treated like trash, and tell them when the solution is not reasonable, and stick with that -- the solution is not reasonable, they need to X or Y or Z. If they ask you to push on, repeat it - these are the solutions. If they push more, repeat it, these are the solutions. They have no choice but to get it, because that's the reasonable limit that you've set.
Your comment comes across as vehemently selfish. They're family. It costs you nothing. Just support your family. However for your response I'm sure they avoid calling you unless they have no other real choice, because interacting with you must be just _great_. I hope they support you just as much as you've indicated that you want to help them.
For context for the following, let me first say that I have taken your approach for requests made to me, for family and friends, requests of most types, for a long time. I help people as soon as requested and I have neither asked for nor received something in exchange. I am still happy to keep doing this. However...
Your comment blames someone for an attitude that can make sense in a number of cases, and they did not say enough to determine whether those cases apply. They may be reacting to this from people who make reasonable requests politely and respond with gratitude, but this is not the only type of user you face while doing it. Read comments on articles that discuss this and you'll see many other cases, such as the "you have to fix it now" guy, the "why is it taking so long" guy, and the "you broke everything" guy. Part of the reason why I've continued to work for my friends and family is that I've at most gotten the low levels of this. While I too have had the experience of someone calling me to figure out how I broke their computer a few weeks after I fixed it, weeks in which it was working fine, I have not had anything extreme. If I did, I too would have dropped that person from my free support.
Not that I don't get unreasonable requests. I recently was asked to obtain a free computer, set it up, and teach a user how to use it. The user concerned was a friend of the daughter of someone I have helped before and would help again. The person to receive this free computer was someone I had never met. I did it. However, I must say that, when I was chided for my slowness in the process of repairing an old machine so I could give it to them, I did start to get annoyed with people who took my ability to do free labor and provide free equipment for granted. Incidentally, they also thought I could obtain a free Microsoft Office license. They got LibreOffice and that's all they're getting. Since I am a programmer, people have also requested, in the same way that they request help with a computer problem, that I write mobile apps or websites for them or their business. These I have occasionally done if they are small enough, but even I will reject some of them even if I could do them.
You don't know whether the person concerned has been the recipient of unreasonable demands and reactions, but it might be helpful to consider that they might have. It is also helpful to consider whether there is a double standard. I provide computer help for free, but I do not ask my friends to do work for me for free, and they do not offer to do so. I mostly do this because a lot of it is somewhat short and because I agree with you that other options are not great.
Pressure implies obligation. Unless there's a support contact and ostensibly funds changing hands, there is no obligation to maintain or add whatever feature to a project. If it's truly open source, those making demands can fix it themselves by either contributing or they can fork right off and make their own version. In other words, suffer not the trolls. Icon because I'm taking my coat and forking right off for the left pondian long weekend.
There was an earlier blog post about similar pressures put on open-source maintainers. I replied in Redditt that if they, (the pushy, demanding requestor), wasn't pleased with the support then they could always fork-off!
I've never had to say that in real life as I chose to contribute to Rosettacode.org where I knew that support is limited by the nature of that web site, and I could contribute in the time I was willing to allocate.
Apart from people who are self-employed and can make FOSS a genuine part of their income, I can't see that the people with full-time jobs who do a bit of coding on a weekend are going to be swayed by the offer a tiny amount of cash to have to deal with expectations and abuse from entitled users. I can take that in my day job, because I have to. But you'll have to match that pay packet before I'll take it on my time.
People too readily forget that creators/maintainers have exactly the same need to try and obtain sufficient resources to be able to stay alive as they do. I've got a backlog of projects I've been trying to work on, but just simply can't as Being Alive Costs Money, so I have to trade my time to get that money, which results in me getting home utterly shattered, collapsing on the settee, dragging myself to bed, to drag myself out at crack of dawn to start all over again.
I'm sounding like a broken record, I'm sure, but again : money can employ people to do things. You need someone to do your admin, support and suchlike? Pay them!
People that do support, community liaison, graphic design, and sysadmin are just as deserving of money as the programmers.
'Money is not going to solve all problems'. Remind me what the dominant operating system platforms are? Clue : ALL of them are effectively proprietary, developed by throwing money and paid employees at it.
By the numbers the number one operating system is Android - which at its base is open source, a huge win. Except the bits everyone actually wants to use are commercial (Google's runtime), the apps everyone uses run on a commercial service, even if you're running an open source ROM the number of users that shim Google Apps on to it is incredibly high.
There's then Windows - which is mostly closed source, followed by iOS and Mac OS - both based on FreeBSD and Mach open source with commercial closed source bits on top that make it livable.
By the time the statistics reach unarguably completely open source operating systems the usage percentages are statistically insignificant - and at least for Linux a lot of the development is driven by large corporates employing paid staff.
So many articles in the last months about how bad the OpenSource world is, from a tyrannical mr. Torvalds, Greybeards putting up hurdles to join, bad attitudes towards women and name calling rants.
The message these authors are spreading is that the OpenSource world must be hell, and it has no future, since who would join something like this ?.
A pattern can be seen here, these "authors" don't even bother to mention why OpenSource exists in the first place, it provides freedom from the Stalin communist dictatorship world of licenses offered by commercial companies. There will always people who will fight and work for their freedom, OpenSource is not going away.
Maybe El-Reg should focus more on positive articles, give info about OpenSource and stop the stream of sewage of infotising non-sense written by Big-Tech bots.
I think you've misinterpreted most of those articles:
"a tyrannical mr. Torvalds": Do you mean that Torvalds gets to decide what goes in Linux and what doesn't? Because that isn't tyrannical, it's how a lot of leaders work. He tends not to overrule everyone else for no reason, but when there is disagreement about whether something will go in or not, he is often consulted.
"Greybeards putting up hurdles to join": No, you've definitely got that one wrong. It was asking why younger people were not joining, not why older ones were keeping them out, because they weren't doing so, at least not actively. The comments suggested several reasons, including that young people actually weren't out after all, or various stereotypes about young people which struck me as flawed, but don't work with a conspiracy of the elders to keep the kids out.
"name calling rants": Yes, that happened. That isn't saying that all open source does that. When it happens, especially on important projects, it is news.
"The message these authors are spreading is that the OpenSource world must be hell": No, they're spreading actual news. People who want to work on open source might want to know what happens. If they want to work on Linux, for example, they might want to know that there are a lot of people with lots of experience, that getting into it for the first time will not be easy, that there are some people who may get angry at their code, and that Linus Torvalds can make final decisions if it comes to it. Some of those things are neither good nor bad, and the ones that are bad are also facts of life. It might be nicer if nobody got name-cally or ranty with code they didn't like, but some do, so people should expect it. And this brings us to the one I left out earlier, the one about women being treated unfairly. That is also news, and if the article is correct, it allows us to focus on whether and what sexism exists and what we can do about it. If the article is correct, talking about it will help us fix it while remaining silent would make it continue. If the article is incorrect and there is no problem, then it allows us to prove that.
I agree with your view that open source has a fundamental value. But your world salad "Stalin communist dictatorship world of licenses offered by commercial companies" is just bizarre. Open source is a communist endeavor, or at least much closer to being one than the capitalism closed-source commercial software offerings. Capitalism is great, and I've benefited enormously from it, but it also has obvious huge downsides, and I'm glad that there are enough people with communist/socialist leanings to power the open source movement.
The biggest problem I see is that we don't find new developers taking over at least some of the maintenance effort. A prime reason I see for this is the startup difficulty. I have been casting around to get involved in an Open Source project, but each one I've examined lacks internal documentation.
I would strongly encourage current Open Source software developers and maintainers to begin preparing internal documentation. Architecture documents, class hierarchies and descriptions of owned functionality (if object oriented), outside resources used and interfaces, processing model, rules regarding things such as memory responsibility (who allocates, deallocates), thread usage, design patterns, etc. Formal documents not necessary, a wiki would be fine for this.
I know it's a lot of work (having written these), but the work spent now will reduce the work needed substantially in the future.
The phrase " 'how hard could it be?' brigade" is used early in this article, and I think this would bear better examination. When paying for a product, it is reasonable to negotiate certain features, fixes, adjustments as covered by the agreed upon payment. Customer wants complete redesign of front end? That's going to cost you more.
With open source, there often isn't a way to manage this, and there are no limit of good ideas on new features and improvements, without all the necessary hours to implement them. Everyone thinks it's easy, until they see that what they're asking for might not fit the hacked-together data model that's barely holding things together and would need a complete rewrite. The overblown sense of entitlement from users for something provided in good will, for free, makes it easy to see why maintainers would decide to walk away. Beggars want to be choosers, and will open GitHub Issues to say so. That might be a good place to say "if you want that, how much are you willing to pay for it?"
Argue the next statement if you like, but most home-based end-users are not capable of using much opensource software.
The most important users of opensource software are the businesses that don't know what they need or cannot afford it. They do however, have system or software people who are aware opensource solutions exist. These Experts / Engineers / Devs invent fixes that evolve into mission critical systems throughout the enterprise.
It is too easy for under-valued, skilled people focused on the opensource universe to work towards name recognition or elegant, idealized goals. They should instead seek customers that have specific needs, and offer services.
That said, it is much easier for others in the enterprise, competing for promotions and $$ to under value opensource. They will pick a vendor, promote shamelessly, and leech their way to the top. These people would be better off accessing available resources, including opensource, and creating the most useful solutions.
I have 45 years of system and software experience, am semi-retired with enough to not worry, and hope that both developers and businesses recognize and utilize the value of opensource.
I was a prolific open sourcer for over a decade and FWIW was never about the money but the sense of community and building something that might be useful to people and filled some functional or abstraction gaps. It's also a way to find like-minded people or consolidate around higher order solutions, often across timezones and cultures.
Throwing money at FOSS maintainers doesn't solve or even make better the experience of building these things. Creeping cultural issues around entitlement to having features prioritized, license 'incompatibility', and generally abusive beneficiaries really sucked all the joy out of what should be a free, open, experimental and hopefully helpful ecosystem.
I've found contributing to open source rewarding when it's been a project for average humans. But projects where the primary audience is corporations? That I've never felt good about. It's hard for me to justify the free labor used to support a profit making enterprise. And I think it's a bit sad that the industry for commercial software tools has largely collapsed, and no one wants to pay engineers or vendors for such tooling anymore.
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