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  ValdikSS
  The document is about the social aspect of the _most common_ open-source code model, and social pressure of the _most common, unspoken expectations_ of the developers and the users.Could we maybe invent the exact definition of this model? Because "open source" for me (and in general) is definitely not that.Two examples:1. Remember GitHub before free private repositories: lots of technically open source code not intended to be used by anyone besides the author, which was published only because the author don't want to pay to make it hidden. You're free to use it (given the open-source license), but neither of you have maintenance expectations.2. GNU not only allows to sell free software, but encourages that, _even if you did not make it_. This is quite rare, to the point that it makes people angry at you when you try to sell someone's software.
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  agunapal
  I think it comes down to "Is the juice worth the squeeze"As someone who worked for a large organization maintaining an OSS project, one issue I faced was how do you show impact? We used to have many organizations really love and use our project , but they would hardly give anything back to the project, including writing blogs where they could have shared some success stories. IMO github stars/pip downloads etc are not good metrics and these are even worser metrics in today's agentic AI world. Its so easy to fake these nowdays.
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  avaer
  This triggers me hard.> One source of toxic behavior is entitled users.It's hard to explain to people how insane things can get when you give away your work and time for free, in the hope that it will benefit people. Some things I've experienced: - People yelling at me in DM's when I didn't edit a podcast for community meetups in time - Alcoholics joining in on FOSS meetups because they wanted attention - People in the community getting spammed with crypto scams impersonating me that I had to answer to - My work being whitelabeled and sold to investors to raise money to the extent people accuse me of stealing from others - Smear campaigns making their way to my employer when I decided not to work on a particular open source project anymore - I gave away hardware to community members; the reward was tech support requests - Suicidal community members using me as a therapist (they claim I "saved their life"), followed by taking private (non FOSS) source code and giving it to to my competitors to advance their own tech careers This is just scratching the surface of the things I've had to deal with in my open source work. I've learned to draw much stricter boundaries.If you are going to get into open source communities you should go in with a plan for how you're going to deal with these kinds of things when they happen to you.
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  bmitch3020
  The suggestion that paying OSS maintainers is a solution really misses some major issues.First is who is going to pay? OSS is popular because it can be adopted without any payment, removing a key piece of friction. And companies are in the business of maximizing their profits, which is often done by minimizing their expenses. Perhaps this can be implemented by the government as a tax, but then borders enter the equation, both for where businesses incorporate, and where OSS developers live, making it a nontrivial matching challenge.But the bigger issue with payments I see is trying to allocate money to the right OSS maintainers. Once money is distributed, scams will appear pretending to be a worthy OSS project, LLMs would be churning non-stop flooding the ecosystem with knockoff projects, people will dispute contributions to take credit for the work of others, and a flood of attempts to collect payments will arrive from overseas locations where the cost of living is low and any payment can be a windfall.My own fear is the result of the latter problem would be a disaster for OSS maintainers. The workload to collect payments, proving the contributions are worthy and not a scam, would dramatically increase the burden on OSS maintainers, in a way that could destroy the ecosystem.
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  corvad
  XZ Utils was a big example of this, the poor maintainer had to put up with toxic users and it led to supply chain compromise after a while.
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  arjie
  Recently, I've noticed a certain idea a lot I didn't see before: that if you make something a lot of people like, you have a responsibility to them. In the real world, this happens if someone has planted a tree in their garden and people like how it looks, then when they want to cut it down, "the community" would like an opinion.Likewise, in the open-source world, after a certain number of things start depending on your work, people often say it "should be considered a public good" - which is particularly confusing because public good seems something entirely different from its other well-known definition.I think this whole idea of "if you make something nice that other people like, you are obligated to serve people forever" is totally bogus. I (well Claude+Codex) write a lot of LLM code these days and many of the base libraries are open source. If I had to write ratatui it would take a long time. But if someone decided to bully the ratatui maintainer I wouldn't ever know. And there's no way to un-bully someone anyway.
• msukkarieh
  As one of the cofounders of an open source tool (Sourcebot) we have seen the "AI slop PR" issue explained here first hand. The amount of of PRs we get now from people who clearly have never even deployed or used our tool is staggering. We're working on a solution for this that leverages our tool, and plan to make it available for free for OSS projects. If you have any ideas, please reach out to me: michael at sourcebot(dot)dev
• christkv
  Working on open source feels like working in retail a lot of the time.
• AndyMcConachie
  What pisses me off the most is that there are companies making billions of dollars off the labor of others and many of them don't even acknowledge it.
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  phendrenad2
  This is going to sound heretical, but sometimes burnout is a blessing in disguise, and a sign that you shouldn't be pouring your heart and soul into something that isn't benefitting you, and might not even be benefitting others. I think a lot of FOSS projects have bad "product-market-fit", and if they were paid products they would be ignored, but since they're free, they get a lot of drive-by downloads from people who are just curious, but still might file a lazy bug report or complain that you used C and not Rust or something. Sometimes I wonder if FOSS projects should start as paid (or at least freeware) and once the product is proven to be useful to people, then open-source it.
• ThomIves
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• steffs
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• mohamedabdallah
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• eddyaipt
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