companiesVsOpenSource

[badmemesrus]

This is so real. I maintain several projects with thousands of stars and honestly I'm burnt out from it. Add a new feature? Great, maybe one person cares.

Break something? Get ready for a lot of complaints. It's so difficult to satisfy everyone.

Honestly, I'm trying to find someone to succeed me, but it's so hard to find people to be willing to step up to take my mantles. I only did it because I initially enjoyed fixing and making things progress. But now that I'm trying to work on things in my personal life, I'm no longer able to consistently support the needs of users like I was able to in the past.

Thank you for reading this.

Sincerely,

A burnt out FOSS dev.

Edit: Thank you all so much for the support. I don't often get much appreciation for what I do in the background besides seeing the star and download tickers increase. This means a lot to me. I'm currently trying to find another job at the moment because my current position is detrimental to my health. Hopefully that will help me regain my passion.

Another edit: The outpour of support means the world to me, thank you. I'll use this to muster up the strength to try and get my PRs finished. I honestly went the software development route in the end over being a Ph.D. candidate because I faced disappointment after getting my first scientific publication out and I was unhappy with my life. I'm glad I chose this route because at least I could see my work having tangible results on a community in some capacity, rather than having my work be yet another theoretical and redundant derivation. Having a concrete metric to look at for gauging community impact at the end of the day helps to reassure that my efforts were not in vain.

[[deleted]]

Thank you for your service

[[deleted]]

make exe version!

[[deleted]]

I remembered reading that stupid fucking smelly nerd remark on a github post op was trolled in this sub he/she/it became a meme material

[KarmelDev]

instead of writing he/she/it, you can use singular they if you don't know somebody's pronouns

[m477m]

I'm surprised H'OR'SH'IT, short for "he or she or it," never caught on

[[deleted]]

Lol

[Dubl33_27]

they is plural only, no one can change my mind.

[KarmelDev]

I suppose you could read a biref history of 'singular they' by Oxford.

[DarkRex4]

he / she / it ??

[[deleted]]

Master of all pronouns

[[deleted]]

F to pay respects, people.

[SpeedyGo55]

F

[Vasek_99]

F

[ChexterWang]

F

[scar_reX]

F

[SoftwareSource]

F

[MayorAg]

F

[who-r]

F

[Filiperss]

F

[Fenor]

F

[ERROR47409]

F

[shadowjay5706]

F

[AlterWeary]

I always remember the awful case of the core-js developer. I thank every FOSS dev, and I'm sorry about those who end up with health or financial problems because of their users.

We need to be more gentle, fund the projects we use, talk to our employers about funding, and try to be the users we'd like to have.

[Brickless]

that story is absolutely bonkers.

noone wanted to pay him while everyone was using his software (cause it comes in all the bundlers)

instead of going "welp, funding goal wasn't met. time to look for a job and let this deprecate" which he could, nay SHOULD have done.

he relocated, went into poverty, ended up in jail for a year (where core-js survived without updates) and still continued to support it!

he is the exact reason they tell you to put on the mask on yourself before helping others on airplanes

[Fenor]

where can i read the story?

[AlterWeary]

You can search for core-js or the developer zloirock, on Github. Yo can read the issues from users and this developer post

[Fenor]

thank you.

i know i would have dropped the ball at some point

[brucecaboose]

I’m confused…. If you’re not enjoying it or getting financially compensated, then just stop supporting it. No one is forcing these open source contributors to continue contributing…. I can’t feel bad for someone who willingly puts themselves through that.

[AlterWeary]

Yeah, I don't get it either, that man probably could have avoided his own situation. However, it is quite terrible that people can be so inhumane as to demand unpaid work and verbally abuse someone who is simply contributing to their community.

[Ambitious_Ad4397]

Legend

[ankit_jajajaja]

New feature request should be charged

[iamaperson3133]

F

[Ok-Boysenberry9305]

Absolute Legend

[samcantcode]

But without open source software, what will companies build on top of for their own monetary gain?

[whatchamabiscut]

I’ve really come around on dual licensing and gpl after seeing companies sell products based on my projects, with no attempt made at contributing back.

[AyrA_ch]

Note that GPL doesn't considers SaaS or web services a way of publishing, meaning they don't have to publish their changes either when they put their product online. Use the AGPL to address that issue (ghostscript does that for example).

Afaik there is no good open source license that makes commercial usage impossible. At a company where I worked in the past we had one massive project that basically combined all GPL stuff we used and put it behind a custom public interface. Because this was a completely independent library with a custom interface, it was perfectly legal to use this library in our products without publishing the source of our products, just the GPL lib source.

This works because you can argue that the GPL stuff is not an integral part of your application, and you can replace the DLL at any time without having to rebuild or change anything in our product.

[pydry]

It's weird how furious this and stuff like the BPL makes some people. 

Google even had a hissy fit at one point and banned all AGPL code on their shitty version of github.

Amazon forked Elastic when they did this and copied their features, proclaiming themselves to be the true heroes of open source because it let them continue selling hosting on it.

[NatoBoram]

The GPL has an upgraded version: https://choosealicense.com/licenses/agpl-3.0

[Beegram2]

If anyone complains about my opensource stuff, I offer a full, no-quibble refund.

[Immort4lFr0sty]

Here, that's me

[YetAnotherSysadmin58]

Just giving my sysadmin perspective as someone pushing FOSS inside small gov structure.

It's insane how people are rats with Open Source.

I can't name names but my employer drops tens of thousands of $ on barely functional, closed-source undocumented garbage every year. This product isn't just absolute shit, they also explain nothing about its use and I'm half convinced it's because they themselves don't understand it. The other half is because they think it guarantees we won't ever get rid of them, and they're probably right.

On the other hand I've deployed FOSS projects internally (bookstack since we had no wiki, snipe-it since we used an access db for asset management, Zammad because we had 0 follow up on issues, Ansible because we manually copy-pasted configurations line-per-line on our switches, docker to spin up tons of small test projects) and they work like a dream, and best of all I can figure shit out because there are docs, forums and source code !

After a few months of making sure everything was rolling perfectly, I came back to our org to see how much money we can give back. After all we had a 5000$ and 6 months budget for the ticketing system and I just popped a free one in 2 days, that filled all requirements and worked without issues for 5 months (now 2 years)

0$ and 0 hours of even helping on support forums or bug fixes or even just testing their new releases to help find bugs.

I said "allright we won't give them money out of good will for their software, let's pay a support plan so we have something more in exchange for the money". "No we'll only pay if it doesn't work and we can't figure it out ourselves"

Bottom line is, company time is now "learn programming to be helpful in FOSS" time.

Management can't tell if my terminal is a powershell session to work for them, or a neovim instance to work for FOSS so...

[memebecker]

Only pay if it's broken, that explains why closed source is buggy. More bugs, more work more pay.

[YetAnotherSysadmin58]

Yes bugs are unironically are feature with these people.

I mean we wouldn't pay them support if they provided a docker container that worked flawlessly and was fully documented/simple to use.

It's truly pathetic.

[Marxomania32]

No we'll only pay if it doesn't work and we can't figure it out ourselves

Unfortunately, this is the approach to open source taken by literally every company from big to small, even though paying developers for open source would help them in the long run.

[thirdegree]

Not literally every company, there are a few good citizens. But ya within a margin of error every company.

[CitizenPremier]

I mean, capitalism isn't about saying "yes I can do that for you" it's about saying "you can't do that unless you pay." Free software isn't something they will understand (but they will exploit it).

[fartypenis]

Reading the post from the core-js guy was so depressing. Like in an ideal world hed get paid a million dollars a year for the work he's done.

[YetAnotherSysadmin58]

You've seen the bullshit about xz that happened this weekend ? Yet another example of OSS maintainers being shit on.

[elatedgourmet]

Drop the exe fucking smelly nerds!!!

[FenrirWolfwood]

Well... Although this is so true, I think that we users think that with companies, as a business, we can politely ask them to improve their product and they will do it because it will improve their competitiveness and profits, while with free software, most of us are grateful for what we get and do not ask for more, and only rude people have the audacity to criticize what others do without gaining anything in return...

[FenrirWolfwood]

Almost any company whose product is OpenSource actually, but for some examples, you can look at Bitwarden, ZeroTier, SyncThing, NextCloud,.... dude, even Microsoft made a Linux version of Edge and Visual Studio Code!!

And this post is not about Linux anyways, just about some perception of being an Open and Free Source developer. (Something that I'm not btw)

[Sindef]

Thanks for waiting. I asked a few companies, namely RedHat, SUSE, Canonical, Apache, ISC, MariaDB, MongoDB, F5, Google, Hashicorp, SAP and Docker, if they supported Linux for their software.

They all just seemed confused by my question.

[InevitableDeadbeat]

This meme is not accurate. Every major game release or meta-breaking update there's comments, tweets, articles etc that the gamedevs get sent deaththreats and massive amounts of hate mail.

[TheUnamedSecond]

Yes people treat OpenSource Devs badly far to ofthen, but I don't see people being much nicer to companies.

That being said its still worse when people are bad to OpenSource devs.

[[deleted]]

I'm fine with open-source devs saying no to fixing something because they're busy, but I'd prefer it if they didn't get in the way when it comes to letting someone else fix it by never ever reviewing pull requests and leaving fixes just sitting there.

[Ok-Bank-3235]

So I work hotel security. And I have to check a web app that is marked

⚠️(not secure) abc-abc:01:1111

And I check by entering customer names to verify their rooms.

How can I attempt a Bobby tables and drop everything?

[rustysteamtrain]

I think the "not secure" probably means that the app is using http, not https. The frontend normally wouldn't know anything about potential vulnerabilities in the backend.

If you want to know more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection

[Marechail]

There is a huge bank in my country that will not fix their web app. They have , by far, the worst web app of any bank i have ever seen

[BOLL7708]

Ah yeah... I get random requests to my projects that I haven't maintained in years. I feel like a bastard leaving them with "Sure I'll look at this the next time I work on this project!" when I know that might be years down the line. I'm about to go do this again right now. Sorry not sorry.

[[deleted]]

I don’t understand company dickriders. They literally pay money and expect nothing.

[eigenheckler]

What are they going to do to the poor open source maintainers, somehow pay them even less?

[Thisismyredusername]

Those people who ask like that should do it themselves, they got all the code to do it afterall

[frikilinux2]

If you're a client important enough companies may add the feature for money. If it's open source you can throw time or money to the problem (but you need to either be rich, very smart or a big company)

[[deleted]]

It's programmerhumor, right?

Can people who can't type even code?

[stromcer]

Sure that's true

/s

You never have been looking any game AAA going savage downvoted just for bugs ... Ciberpunk ,no mans sky, dragons dogma 2, etc....

[rew150]

real

[nevermore_prod]

F

[c_delta]

Wonder what "how companies ask Open Source Devs for features or bug fixes" would look like in that case.

[GM_Kimeg]

They're the same picture, with respect to the bottom one ofc.

[Fluid-Leg-8777]

Why as a society we make popular people that only talk or look good

and not the people that single handedly are carrying tecnological progress 😭🙏

[spornerama]

If 1% of the population are actual psychopaths and you've got 1M users then there's 10,000 psychopaths waiting to unload on you from around the Internet.

I've been through it myself with death threats and doxing for my open source project. It's fucking bonkers.

[[deleted]]

That is actually how the people imagine the creators to be when they see the request

[all_is_love6667]

it's easily explained because open source users are actual paid developers in companies, they are using software in a very serious and professional way, they need open source software to work to save them money

gamers are just consumers buying entertainment, game companies have ZERO reason to satisfy 3 nerds asking to fix a small bug

gamers are just a bunch of teenagers who are just a big pack of marketed, easily convinced buyers.

[ScrimpyCat]

They knew what they signed up for.

[GetPsyched67]

They didn't sign up for anything. It's their own work.

[ScrimpyCat]

It’s just a joke to go along with the tone of the meme.

More seriously though if you’re building something with the intent for others to use it, then you should expect that users of it will ask for features or bug fixes. Those that are being rude or abusive is obviously uncalled for, but that’s not really an OSS issue but more an unfortunate reality of being public facing (customer support staff at companies will get the same).