[playpause]

“Open source developers need not be burning themselves out, they can just choose to work on what they want. ” – that sounds nice, but you must be missing something, or we would not have the phenomenon of OSS developers burning out.

The observation that people in paid jobs also get burned out doesn’t give much insight into the curious, sad reality of the experience of an OSS dev working to to the point of burnout for a constant stream of non-paying clients who are often rude and unprofessional in their interactions with you.

Open source developers can’t ‘just’ choose what they work on, anyway. There are benefits in maintaining an OSS project (exposure, satisfaction at making something that a lot of people use) but these only apply if you focus your efforts on projects that become popular, which are exactly the projects that suffer the problems discussed in the article.

[yason]

Open source developers can’t ‘just’ choose what they work on, anyway.

Oh yes they can.

However, if the developers choose to chase popularity, then it's a different game and they must recognise that the stakes will be higher then. Yet that has no relevance to open source itself.

You can very well chase popularity, satisfy rude customers to the world's end, and eventually burn out writing a closed-source shareware application, too.

I tried to convey they point that the fact that there are burned out open source developers is not an inherent trait of open source itself.

You don't need to open your source to get rude customers, endless demands, and gigantic requirements. If you choose to deal with all that then that is always your own choice and you must face the consequences. But it's the same class of problems whether you write open source or start a pizza restaurant. Some customers are just net-negative. In any business or hobby where you provide something you must learn to set limits to how high the customer's bang-for-buck must be for you to come meet in the middle.

I would tend to think there are more open source projects that are abandoned rather than with burned out developers, but I obviously don't have data on that.

[tonyedgecombe]

You don't need to open your source to get rude customers, endless demands, and gigantic requirements.

In my experience the less you charge the more of that stuff you get. There is something about the very bottom of the pricing scale that is toxic.

[lsc]

It is... really weird. I think it might be related to how the boss will be more respectful to you after you successfully negotiate a raise.

Like normal people are somehow wired to treat more expensive people better than less expensive people. The immediate explanation is that normal people are kind of jerks?

I mean, I'll put up with more shit for a lot more money... but that's not how it works. As I've gotten paid better, every step of the way, I got treated better in other ways, too. And that expectation is built in everywhere.