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Open source maintainers underpaid and going gray (www.theregister.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/opensource

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[–] CameronDev 19 points 3 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)

[–] [email protected] 37 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 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

[–] CameronDev 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] CameronDev 6 points 3 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 :)

[–] onlinepersona 6 points 3 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

[–] CameronDev 2 points 3 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.