Open source maintainers underpaid and going gray : opensource

[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I have a lot of free time and am willing to contribute.
But the responses I largely got from reaching out to several projects pushed me away again.
If you make someone who wants to help you for free feel like they're ringing your doorbell begging for money, then don't be surprised when your project dies with you.

My "favorite" was one of the lead devs of Slackware, who deployed an edit I had proposed to one of his pages in the Slackware wiki "in the hope of avoiding conversations like this in the future".

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Same with me. I asked upfront if they would accept a PR for a minor change. I described the issue in detail and my proposed fix.

He said sure.

I made the PR.

Same guy comments, "Wtf do you need this for?! We already have X solution with Y features."

I reply back, "Because Y doesn't cover Z use case, which is what I need it for."

The issue was closed without further comment.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I got a single class that supported new hardware written for a controller. They said they don't want the overhead of maintaining an additional class for new hardware (a class that doesn't change ever btw). I thought whatever, works for me, doesn't need to be on the repo and "I got mine". I have since seen 3 people asking if the hardware is supported / asking for it to be implemented. Oh well.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

In that case I'd point them to your fork with a link to the PR where they maintainer chose not to include it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Why? To start problems for me from pissy maintainers when I need help with something?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Man where are all you people? I've been asking for more python contributors for years now and we're very welcoming I'd like to think

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

We really do need some website to easily find projects that people want help on; projects that one can simply jump in on to translate a few strings for example, or fix a small bug that also needs some unit tests added to it that the maintainer hasn't had time to do.

It would also be nice to be able to see the average response time for PRs, the amount of documentation, and "average time to get up and running". Too many times have I seen a "good for beginners" or something tag on github but the project is a nightmare to setup. PHP and C/C++ projects are especially bad. They just assume everybody knows how to get started or have a "this works on my machine" setup, which doesn't work for anybody else but the maintainers and core contributors. I don't want to waste my time with:

hours figuring out how to setup the project
waiting weeks or months for feedback on a supposedly "easy" PR
get extremely pedantic reviews like "a space is missing" or "a new line before this function" or "this is a method, not a function"

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It's really sad. But it sounds like a natural consequence of doing it under capitalism. I wish for a time when everything will be open source by default

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This really is the only way if we want competition (lower prices) and choice. All actual revenues would be derived from service provision (consulting, customization, tech support, certification).

From a "small c" capitalism perspective, it is not normal that MS, Nvidia, Apple have such insane margins. Competition should have forced them to lower prices while offering the same level of products/services.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Regulation that prevent's insane copmpamy buys and mergers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It won't happen. What might is paying back if you use it for commercial projects.

Something like you pay some percent of your gross to an organisation and that gets split between the top level dependencies you use and then split down through their dependencies.

Software remains free for non commercial use, companies pay a fair share and the Devs get paid.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I guess it's a wishful thinking, on the line of corporations pay for the damage and pollution they create...

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (3 children)

In my (very limited) experience, even getting contributions is near impossible. Lots of people like to open issues, far fewer like to work on solving them.

Add in xz, and my package will likely die with me (which is fine, its not critical, and I have a few decades left)

[–] BellyPurpledGerbil 37 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I've attempted to submit PRs to open source projects for most of my career and it's such a fuckin nightmare. 99% of the time I'm just trying to patch a bug. I get:

Ignored for months and eventually rejected without reason
Repeated pushback on whether the fix is necessary
Snarky feedback
I have had multiple occasions where one of the regular maintainers copied my code to a new branch and PR, then merged my changes under only their name, instead of sending me review comments or collaborating on edits

Open source is often not open contribution. The reason why open source projects die isn't because nobody is contributing. It's because project owners usually kinda suck. It's like contributing to StackExchange. IDK if it's just that programmers tend to be contentious assholes or what.

Edit: Don't get me started on abandonware. I don't know if anyone uses FoundryVTT but module creators tend to abandon their software and never update it again, forcing people to fork it just to maintain the project through new versions

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

You're not wrong. Ive had all those experiences as well :(

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't know why, but there are a few projects I've tried contributing to that are just extremely tiresome to get running and when a PR comes in to improve it, they pick it to death or outright reject it. "Works on my machine", "I don't like $technology", "We already use gitpod, this is unnecessary", etc. have made me unwilling to invest time in projects that look difficult to setup.

"Just run ./configure && make && make install". Has not worked for me. Not even once.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Thanks to AUR, I haven't manually run a autoconf build in years, but I remember them being very fiddly. Lots of "google for header file, install and retry".

I think maintainer burn-out somewhat contributes to the hostile approach some projects have, anything that is accepted into a project needs to be maintained and comes with a risk of being broken in the future. If the original committer isnt around, then the maintainers either have to take on that burden, or remove it.

Its a tough cycle to break, I don't know what the answer is.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well, maybe whoever decides to rewrite it (in Rust) can use the issue list for inspiration.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Lol, its an Octoprint plugin, and I already rewrote half of it to Rust, but the other half is going to be Python as long as Octoprint is.

I'd be happy for someone to fork and/or rewrite it :)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I’m an unpaid maintainer working on my own projects, so far I got (in my opinion) a lot of external contributions on those projects but people do not stay.

I just like working on my projects for fun, and seeing the stars in GitHub people seem to like the project, I’m just the only one creating issues on it and improving the product mainly for fun.

As a maintainer it isn’t easy to get people onboard, as a contributor I have very strict needs to contribute to a project (good documentation, should be build easily with a few commands and not require a 40 years old version of an unmaintained software, a guide to know how to contribute (contributing.md)), and I’ve done my best to add that to my projects so I could onboard myself from another universe.

Oh and no discord. I had one at first (and still have for webhooks and discussing with a few people, but it’s closed and I’m pushing everyone to GitHub discussion).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

What changed about young(er) people?

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Finances. We can't live in our own home paid for by a single income, don't have a cushy pension to build up and barely have savings to speak of, as our salaries aren't adjusted to the cost of living. Trust me, if I could work on opensource without worrying about the rest, I would. But my rent jumps 5-8% every year while my salary doesn't, the housing prices are insane and would put me in serious debt for 30+ years for an apartment (not house) in a "meh" part of town, which I'd have to sell and buy a new one every 5 years until I can afford a house my parents could buy in their 30s.

Also, I've seen what opensource does to maintainers and how much profit companies have extracted from free work without paying back. I truly believe opensource is the way forward, but not by the current definition many people adhere to (free for everybody including companies).

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I wonder if it's the same worldwide. I think we here in Europe work fewer hours in a year. And also in the USA the average didn't like increase substantially in the last years. I'm not sure about this. Sure, it's become more difficult. But the numbers don't seem to reflect young people work longer than older generations. On average it seems the other way around.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's not really about hours alone.

In the UK the average salary (no data on median) in 1980 was ~£6000, but average house price was £23000, or 3.8x the salary. This is during a recession.

In 2024 the median salary is ~£34000, but the average house price in the last 12 months is £299000, or 8.7x the salary.

And that's just housing. Everything else is more expensive too. And you need more things to participate in society.

The country is FUBAR'd by neoliberalism and austerity policies. The houses that go for millions are barely fit for a dog shed, rotten through and through with mold, filled asbestos, insulation that kills you with gas when it burns, and boy will it burn once the boiler older than the 5 day work week finally explodes.

Almost no young people, few as they may be, have any interest in anything beyond making it to the top 1% and why would they? For them CompSci was a grift, and FOSS is just how you get something in your resume. So maintainers get defensive, and well meaning but less apt coders get discouraged too.

For our generation it doesn't matter if you know git and vim, or only meth and hopelessness, you live in the slums same as everyone. I'm in the top 20% of earners and I couldn't really even justify a big mac as a treat nevermind spending time on passions.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

But I mean if you got the same spare time, just less money... Do you then give up having hobbies? Or have different ones? I'd imagine coding isn't that bad since you don't need lots of fancy material goods, just a computer and those got way cheaper.

I can see how someone would be dishartened and then give up contributing to the world. Maybe we see the same dynamics with other voluntary work? I'm not educated on that. It doesn't feel that bad where I live than I get from reading the news... YMMV. But your numbers are right. And I don't like that form of neoliberalism and capitalism over people's lives either.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Because more money buys you more time.

If you got 7 hours and 500 bucks, you've got 7 hours.

Why? Because you've paid people to take care of all your chores.

If you've got 7 hours and 0 bucks, you've got 0 hours.

Why? Well you're taking the bus to the discount grocery store, you're doing your laundry, cooking your meals, you're commuting 1.5 hours each way on broken trains to work and pay £20 for the privilege, you're looking for new jobs because you think you'll be fired, and then you won't be able to make rent, you're doing 1-way AI-led recorded video job interviews and pumping out cover letters and CVs for job applications, yet never heard back, you're comparing payday loans to pay for heat, you're listening out for debt collectors, you're chasing up your GP for that blood test result from 6 months ago you never got, you're trying to find a cheaper place, you're doom scrolling your bank account balance, wondering whether you can cut down on something, anything, maybe a thicker jumper to sleep in during the winter.

At the end of the day, you might have a few minutes to kiss your partner, or apologize to a friend you still haven't got back to for weeks, and not much else.

So yes, most people cannot afford hobbies. The only thing people can risk it on is something that promises lots of money and an escape from misery, and it's almost always a grift.

Now there's no such thing as a hobby coder, it confuses the average person that someone could, as an adult, just make an app for them and their friends, as just a fun thing, as art, as expression or project or whatever. I always tell my coworkers I'm studying for qualifications, but I'm really just learning active directory because it's interesting.

It is only a thing you either grind for to make money through and pay your dues to the tutorial grifter culture promising big bucks selling endless courses on YouTube by people who are suspiciously not themselves employed as software engineers, or you don't do it at all.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There's a huge problem with OSS projects being toxic to newcomers, already existing maintainers get annoyed when they have to explain the peculiarities of their codebase they believe should be simple to understand (it's not). I've personally stayed away from contributing in the meantime because I have more often than not "asked the wrong question" or have had genuine ones responded with "read the code" or "rtfm". I understand that some stuff is definitely simple to grasp just by looking at it, but I wouldn't be asking if I did, right? The projects that will survive will have good communities and good CoC's, there's definitely outliers in that, the biggest being the Linux Kernel itself, though the problems have been reduced quite a bit in recent years.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Nah, it's not that bad. I've contributed to free software for almost 20 years now and it's not remotely that bad. I get thanked a lot. Maintainers take time to review my ideas and incorporate them so I can use their software how I like. I've learned a lot myself and I get to use all that stuff. So I gained a lot and generally it's been nice interactions.

Occasionally there is some drama. And I'd say there are some computer nerds with behavioral pecularities. It's rare but it happens. I'd say we're all just humans. I'm okay with that, and I've only had that happen to me in like 1 out of 100 interactions or less. I get annoyed by people way more frequently in my every-day life, so I'd say on average the free software world is a nicer place.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Curious what you contribute to such that you have not had a bad experience, since I see people talk of bad experiences with the people in FOSS on every thread like this, and since you were downvoted for sharing your personal experience which, as far as I can tell, seems to be on-topic and civil with no hint of rudeness or "your bad experience definitely never happened/was your own fault".

Speaking as someone who also has no/few bad experiences with certain situations where the majority's experience (at least that I have seen online) is having a lot of negative encounters, so I believe you. I ask because maybe people who want to contribute to FOSS can try contributing to the (type of) things you do too ;)

I have no idea what you contribute to but thank you for your work!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

What I really like to do in my spare time is electronics projects and tinker with microcontrollers. So I've contributed to a few libraries, added some features, tried to fix stuff and participated in a few smart-home projects. And I self-host some web services. There's always some mild annoyances or things I find out while doing the maintenance. And sometimes it's easy enough for me to do some changes myself and I send that to the project.

In my private life, I almost exclusively use Free and Open-Source Software. So if something on my computer doesn't work as expected, I write bug reports. Sometimes I already got to the root of the issue and if it's in a programming language I understand, I don't just file a bug-report but also propose the exact fix.

And some one-off things. During Covid I played Minetest and sent some pull requests out to some mods. And occasionally I see some abandoned (niche) Linux packages or projects and update them. Even if that doesn't get incorporated anywhere, people will at least have the steps to make it work again.

Generally, I'm not that invested in some specific project. It's more some smaller fixes here and there. I think people call these "drive-by commits". I might have some mild form of ADHD, or there's just too much interesting projects out there... But I've struggled homing in on any single one of them. And I can't muster up the time to maintain anything myself, that's just too much of a commitment.

And what I also do is participate in Linux forums or here on Lemmy. Just help people with their woes. Or help them make a decision on what software to use, etc... Aside from writing code, that's also a big and important part of Free Software culture.

My verdict is: Most people I meet are nice. Sometimes they're really interesting people with some crazy niche interests. Sometimes it's some dude from oversees having a job and kids and on the side they also maintain some software for the benefit of everyone. Or I want something fixed, propose something and go to bed, and when I wake up the next day, someone put in lots of thought and some time and fixed my stupid issues, or at least restructured their code so I can use their software how I like. And in the case of Minetest it was either some middle-aged people still invested in playing sandbox games, or some teenagers who were frankly not super adept at coding, but very open to suggestions and learning things. That's the outstanding positive encounters. I don't have that many negative ones. I'm not here for the drama, but like to keep things to the technical aspect. If someone isn't listening or an annoying person, I just don't engage. I mean usually I don't have to use their software. And I can't come up with any specific example that I was involved in. Usually my annoyances are either someone doesn't have the time anymore to maintain their project. But that's okay, interests change and sometime life takes a turn and you can't invest lots of time into everything. Or complexity. Sometimes it's tough to understand some complex software with lots of moving parts and that stops me from engaging, even if I want to. Yeah and I think I talked to a bunch of people who might be on the autism spectrum. I can't really tell but occasionally someone is super blunt and a bit different than people I meet on the street. I can see how being super honest and picking on someones ideas for technical reasons, or rejecting them, citing formalities can discourage newcomers. Honestly... I myself don't care. If someone is straightforward, I just take that as an invitation to be very direct myself. Usually these people are focused on the technical aspects and that aligns with me if I just want to use the technology. I can live with that as long as they give some justification for their reasoning. And usually they do. And it's rare anyways, at least in my experience. So rare that I forgot when I got annoyed by people after the next dozens of very positive encounters. Usually it's steep learning curves that put me off. But we can't do much about this except invest lots of time to write good documentation. And it's a technical problem and not a people-problem.

I'm theoretically against Codes of Conducts and politics in free software projects. I think we should stick to the technical aspects, just respect each other and don't waste each other's time. Be welcoming to contributions and don't care if it's a 14yo kid, a woman or whoever. Most projects get that right. They don't write pages and pages of text to describe their politics, but instead they just do it. I think that's the way to go. I think all of this goes without saying. And if we want to attract people, we should focus on writing documentation that helps them get started, instead of CoCs and GitHub bots that enforce them and make everything more complicated than it really is. But there are some limitations... Bigger projects might have to deal with politics.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

I managed to donate a few patches over the years. But the whole ceremony with a PR around a fix is just too much. It takes more time than I have free.

I have a minor error fix sitting on my computer for over month now. No time to get it merged.

Most of it revolves around how bad the housing situation is.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Never work for free, especially if you're giving charity to big corpo. Or just any organization in general. Use freedom preserving licenses that forces companies to not be too greedy. Use copyleft, everywhere. In your library, in your arts, and in your work if possible.

Opensource