[xyzzy9563]

>Energy drain because of JVM agent change

So funny, he essentially works for free for 10 years, then finally burns out because he doesn't want to put up with a bunch of annoying work? This is why you shouldn't work on open source unless you have a business strategy to get paid. Tons of stuff in life is 100x more annoying and exhausting if you aren't making any money. If he was making $1 million per year from this I doubt his energy would be drained.

[__MatrixMan__]

Disagree, its working for money that's draining. Extrinsic motivation is toxic to many things that might motivate an open source maintainer.

[xyzzy9563]

What about paying your mortgage, food, utilities etc.? Or is that all supposed to come from savings or inheritance?

[__MatrixMan__]

I don't claim to have a recipe that sustains itself, I just find that my energy diminishes if I'm not doing a project for its own sake.

If after ten years the spark was gone we should be happy for that ten year contribution, but I don't think there's any reason to assume that money would've prevented the problems that motivated him to step down. Maybe it could incentivize him to muscle through after the magic was gone, but that's a different sort of thing.

[philipwhiuk]

> If he was making $1 million per year from this I doubt his energy would be drained.

People quit all the time from highly paid jobs due to burnout. This absolutely does not follow.

[yardstick]

> burns out because he doesn't want to put up with a bunch of annoying work

It’s more than annoying work, it’s pointless work needlessly created by people other than him.

It’s like migrating from Java 8 to newer versions, the decision makers placed backwards compatibility at the back of their priority list. Literally a decade later it’s still griefing migrating users, all because “Jakarta not javax” nonsense. I’m greatly simplifying but that’s the essence of it.

Now we have some genius decision to I guess protect against untrusted code doing unexpected things. And at the same time Applets are gone and Security Manager is gone. And the reality is that Java applications aren’t run with untrusted code. The run scripts define all the jars/classes used. If there was some malicious code that wanted to run, I’m fairly confident it would also just modify the run scripts to include this new flag.

So all we’ve gained is support headache and pain, and no real net gain in practice.

[p2detar]

I wouldn't make such a conclusion. I don't think there is any info about whether OP got financial incentives for his work or not. In fact, he posted on Mastodon, he's gonna be doing open source Rust work further on.