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The Unpaid Backbone of Open Source: Solo Maintainers Face Increasing Security Demands (socket.dev)

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

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Solo open source maintainers face burnout and security challenges, with 60% unpaid and 60% considering quitting.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

How many FOSS projects actually benefit "millions and billions of people"? That kind of impact feels like it's few and far between.

Linux or any of the different projects and components that support it and it's development, including all the dev tooling like git, languages, etc. etc. Basically any work on Firefox and web browsers, any work on Wikipedia or it's supporting infrastructure, work on stuff like Lemmy and the fediverse likely will in the long run, torrents and the like, open source game engines, IDEs, Blender, Home Assistant etc. etc. etc.

There are a lot of open source projects that have a lot of rippling ramifications, and there is inherent benefit in having more open source software developed independently. If Firefox was a better funded and more competent alternative to Chrome we wouldn't even have this whole Manifest v3 mess since Chrome would just lose all their users.

[–] Kissaki 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If Firefox was a better funded and more competent alternative to Chrome we wouldn’t even have this whole Manifest v3 mess since Chrome would just lose all their users.

I don't think that's an issue of competency - which I understand as functionality/feature parity in this wording.

Chrome gained and became this popular likely entirely due to Marketing and big-corp ecosystem network effect through pushing it - through Google, Google Docs, and related Alphabet services.

I don't think Firefox was every really inferior. I've always preferred the dev tools and a few other things over Chrome. There was merely a time where performance was worse, but that likely only mattered in benchmarks - and marketing.

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

Chrome and all the various Chromium spinoffs got popular partially through anti-competitive tying, but not entirely. Safari, IE, and Edge were also anti-competitively tied and yet they did not see meteoric rises in the same way.

The reality is that a large part of the reason that Chrome got popular is because they wrote the best JavaScript engine, by orders of magnitude, right at the time that web apps were taking off. Google wrote a better JavaScript engine because they were a web app company, but it benefited every single page that used any Javascript.

While Firefox devs were still debating whether or not a web page should just be a static document, the web browser became the most successful ever cross platform development framework in history, vastly out stripping the likes of Java and Q++, and yet, it's 10 years later and Firefox still does not have proper PWA support.

[–] Kissaki 1 points 1 month ago

and Firefox still does not have proper PWA support

I recently had to learn about that, targeting PWA. :(

When I read "you can install an extension for it" I thought that would be simple enough. But that extension then requires an additional Firefox installation which causes it's own share of problems. (Comparatively complicated setup process despite simple walkthrough wizard with installer integration, program shortcuts being added, Firefox onboarding being triggered in the PWA.)