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

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/opensource

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[–] CameronDev 19 points 1 month ago (6 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 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

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