[FinnLobsien]

If you have a hobby project like writing a blog, crocheting, or almost any other creative hobby, you can dip in and out however it suits you. If you deal with major life events, sicknesses, etc., you can leave the hobby and come back. Nobody is paying you for it, so nobody can complain (maybe the friends who miss you, but it's not actively impacting the real world).

Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.

It's like if you loved crocheting, but somehow if you stopped crocheting everyone in your city would no longer have clothes and need to walk around naked.

[nitwit005]

> Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.

Which you should happily abandon if you get bored.

If people truly need something fixed, they can fix it themselves, or pay someone to get it fixed.

[pibaker]

It is very hard to just quit any hobby cold turkey if you have built your entire identity, your friendships, your social standing and in the case of FOSS even your employability around it.

Maintainers are human. That means their welfare matters. But that also means when the thing hurting them is the thing they have grown so attached to, they can't just walk away from it like throwing away a piece of expired bread.

[Aurornis]

> Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.

This is why forks happen. It’s very common for a maintainer to decide they’re stepping away from a project or even that they’re not supporting use cases or bug fixes. Then someone starts a fork and, if they are supporting it better than the original maintainer, the traction moves to that project. This happens all the time.

> It's like if you loved crocheting, but somehow if you stopped crocheting everyone in your city would no longer have clothes and need to walk around naked.

I think this is the fallacy at the center of a lot of these debates. In this analogy, people wouldn’t actually around naked. They’d come up with a new solution. They’d switch to sewn or imported clothes. Maybe some other group steps in and learns how to crochet and takes over.

The messier situations occur when one person simultaneously wants to maintain a tight hold on a project and its community, but the maintainers or the community don’t want to endorse any fork attempts. I’ve written before on HN about how some past attempts to form projects have been met with undue hostility for trying to “steal” someone’s pet project. Even open source communities can be hostile to companies forking projects, like all of the complaints that come up about big tech companies profiting off of their own forks of open software (which removes the burden from upstream maintainers). Another examples is when BambuLabs forked PrusaSlicer and there were years of cheap shots at the company for it (though those went away as everyone remembered that Prusa forked another project to make PrusaSlicer).

I really think maintainers who don’t want to do things should come out and say they don’t want to do those things. Let the communities and companies adapt accordingly. The worst state is this in between that happens some times where the maintainers want to retain tight control over the project and community and they try to give an impression of being the everything-to-everyone maintainer when they secretly hate it. It would be so much better for everyone if maintainers would just come out and say things like “I’m tired of fixing security bugs so everyone be warned, as security issues come out I’ll fix them when I get around to it.”

[devsda]

And the expectations

- People asking for and always expecting new patterns and colors.

- Raise hell if you miss a few superficial stitches and demand immediate patch work.

- No exit path without complaints. If you find it unsustainable and ask for help with the cost of materials for the *next* batch while the current batch is still out there and works fine, you are blamed for (literal) rug pulling.

[egeozcan]

When I was a kid, we always had New Year's (read: Christmas) decorations (the maximum that wouldn't be out of place in a mostly Muslim country) on a small park in my neighborhood. One year they never appeared, and people were enraged.

The guy the city hired every year had a mob in front of his door. People's letters to the authorities got no answer, so suddenly he apparently became their contact person. I was buying snacks in a nearby shop. I went out when I heard people shouting. They were shouting accusations at a guy who must have just appeared before his door because he was wearing pajamas in that cold weather.

"You Islamists will ruin this country! [0]

Happy with what you did? My children actually cried!"

and so on.

He calmly answered: "This is something I did on my own. This year I got a cancer diagnosis, so I didn't have the motivation. Sorry!"

Him feeling the need to apologize always comes to my mind when I see the toxic comments on their unpaid work that the open source maintainers feel that they need to respond to.

[0]: Well, they did ruin the country. But that's another story.

[dmos62]

That sounds almost surreal. Pretty wild how my model of society doesn't account for this.

[jltsiren]

The society is built on informal expectations like that. People assume that things will go on as before, and they will start relying on it. They assume that for every thing they rely on, there is a bureaucrat somewhere responsible for making it happen. But unless you are that bureaucrat yourself, you probably don't need to be aware of the specifics.

Many things in the society depend on volunteer work. Open source software is unusual due to the scale of it. In other parts of the society, when many people depend on the work of a few, some corporate or government bureaucrat will usually assume responsibility. But in open source software, the few are often still volunteers without any formal responsibilities.

[Ferret7446]

As a non Christian, I feel that Christianity and similar religions did much to counter such harmful innate human tendencies (promoting charity, forgiveness, humility, etc) and the reason why Western societies have been so successful. The trend toward secularism could also explain their recent decline.

[FinnLobsien]

A good way to understand how much we thanklessly rely on some professions, Google pictures of any garbage disposal strike

[dmos62]

Garbage disposal and oss is an amusing comparison.

[GodelNumbering]

yes, one of them is paid.

[Ferret7446]

There are plenty of devs paid to do FOSS, either as a tech company employee or through patron systems

[watwut]

To me it sounds like people assumed the guy skipped christmas decorations for fundamentalist religous reasons. And then projected all their fears and anger on him. Like, this was not reaction to missing decorations. It was fear of fundamentalism taking over and not wanting to cede your little turf.

And I think he was apologizing to placate angry crowd, not necessary because genuine guilt.

[e4325f]

Please can we have the other story?

[egeozcan]

It was a figure of speech, I'd recommend you to follow the news about Turkey.

[lostlogin]

What country was this?

[egeozcan]

Istanbul / Turkey.

Plus code for the park: 326F+73J Beşiktaş, İstanbul, Türkiye

[subygan]

and nobody is willing to pay for it.

[FinnLobsien]

The value created vs value captured equation of OSS must be one of the most lopsided things ever.

If you’re at Google and invent Kubernetes you might still capture 0.000001% (probably less) of the economic value created by Kubernetes, but you probably enjoy very generous comp.

OSS doesn’t have any of that, besides being extremely in demand as a consultant or whatever.

[avaer]

> besides being extremely in demand as a consultant or whatever

Not necessarily. AI has significantly reduced the marketability of that angle, when people can just ask AI about your OSS project.

That is to say, it's only getting more lopsided.

[FinnLobsien]

Sure, but I also feel like at the higher level, you’re not necessarily looking for implementation alone, but for “what should we be doing in the first place?”, which AI can’t help with

[whatever1]

In the past it kinda worked out, because the code of OSS acted as the portfolio of the developers, who would get hired by big corps. (Today with LLMs you have no way of knowing who was the original author)

We definitely do not pay enough for the utility we get from OSS. But on the other hand do we want do copyright in code? Also when you pay for something you can hold liable the vendor if things go south (security holes etc). Do we want the devs of OSS to be in such position?

[FinnLobsien]

In a way it’s good that the equation is so lopsided. A massive part is that software can be replicated infinitely for free. This is why the scale of the value created is so giant.

I definitely do think it’s crazy that someone whose software gets dozens of millions of downloads A DAY can end up making less than someone building a mediocre SaaS app and getting acqui-hired 2 years later.

For the record, I think the VC - Startup ecosystem is incredibly valuable. But it IS crazy how essential software can go essentially unrewarded.

[luke5441]

Yeah, but the software can also be replicated as binaries or as free SaaS.

[luke5441]

Wouldn't one be able to tell from basic research if a project is legit or not. E.g. looking how the developer handles support? If no HM does take OSS work into account, one other reason for publishing my code goes away. Might as well post it as freeware if I want to share it.

[kakwa_]

I feel this is way too fear mongering heavy against developing in Open Source.

I published nearly everything I code on my free time, that's ~100 git repositories. Out of these, ~15 are documented and made generic enough to be used by other people, and out of these ~5 actually have some users, 2 being packaged in mainstream Linux distributions and one even has a CVE.

In total, I have received one AI slop PR. one.

Your mileage may vary, and you may be blessed/cursed with the new redis or xz. But in all likelihood, things will stay more than manageable in terms of critical infrastructure piece.

[Gud]

If everyone needs it, everyone can pay for it.

Don’t take shit just because you release software under a permissive license.