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by thephyber
548 days ago
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I believe Daniel Kahneman did a cognitive science study that pointed out similar concepts related to a day care that used to stay with kids after hours for free, then charged parents a fee for staying late, then removed the fee.[1] The core takeaway is that there is a stark difference in how people treat a social obligation versus a pay-transaction, and even attempting to switch back to the prior relationship doesn’t necessarily work. My experience is that friends and family frequently give things / items / services to the ones they love and feel social obligations / responsibilities to. I think Open Source Abusive Freeloaders think they are in this category with Open Source Maintainers, but Open Source is a strange hybrid of social obligation to people we have no friend/family/community relationship with, so some people are completely missing the expected behavior standards. Also interesting, I saw a high profile tech journalist Dave Winder) have a mini meltdown venting about a very similar abuse of his time by strangers on LinkedIn recently. [1] https://econlife.com/2018/09/unintended-consequences-from-fi... |
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In open source the free-loaders are the entitled ones, expecting maintainers to move mountains to accomodate them.
In fact, I am led to believe that they superficially look the same, but are very different phenomenons with very different results. I feel that the open source maintainer burnout is not driven by price, but by sheer scale of reaching so many "customers" worldwide of any type, which includes nasty people. If 1% of people are narcissists, and your modest library on GitHub is used by 100,000 people, you'll have to deal with 1,000 potential entitled idiots, which is very stressful for a non-paid volunteer job. I bet that if your library was sold for a nominal price, as your link shows, you'd get even more entitled users. The fact is that not many paid products reach as many users as any average open source project. Most of the world is much poorer than the Western countries, and their only choice often is open source.