The foundation of modern software is cracking under the weight of burnout.

The foundation of modern software is cracking under the weight of burnout.

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    I find it so tricky, too. With the maintainers that I see struggling, it’s rarely a lack of contributions that fucks them up, but rather a lack of maintainers. And they can’t easily onboard other maintainers, because:

    1. there’s hardly anyone willing to invest enough time into your project to be a particularly helpful maintainer.
    2. everyone’s just strangers on the internet, who may or may not want to ship malware as part of your project.

    Like, I even have a friend who’s excited for a project that I’m building, but so far, they’re purely cheerleading (which is appreciated), because they do have projects of their own that they find fun, and in particular also a life outside of programming.
    I do not currently struggle with maintainership (because I haven’t announced my projects anywhere publicly 🤪), but yeah, it just feels like it’s asking for a lot, if I were to try to get that friend on board. In particular also, because not many aspects of maintainership are fun.

    • ms.lane@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      I don’t think we need post open.

      Rather, ditch MIT/BSD for GPL (with no LGPL bandaids) and enforce-

      NO WARRANTY

        • Captain Beyond@linkage.ds8.zone
          41·
          2 days ago

          Switching to a proprietary license doesn’t “fund open source” it funds proprietary software

          Which, fine, if your business model is incompatible with an open source license then sure. But don’t present it as something it isn’t

          Edit: You can dual license under a strong copyleft (strong enough to scare moochers away) and a proprietary license (fauxpen or traditional).

    • Jay🚩@lemmy.ml
      3·
      3 days ago

      Postopen probably won’t save it. There are ways to create even more copyleft license but that would mean create everything from scratch. Like compilers to everytool but no one will use that other than who wants complete copyleft works. Not even Linux can use that tools. But no one wants that lol

      • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        It could be part of the solution. We know we can’t go on just like we did. It’s not sustainable and change should be affected inside the opensource system as well as outside.

  • undrwater@lemmy.world
    12·
    3 days ago

    I don’t believe this is a new concept. IIRC, the same claim was made around 20 years ago.

    I suspect these things go through cycles like everything else.

    We should definitely be paying attention when the developers of critical infrastructure begin to burn out.

  • Catalyst@lemmy.ml
    4·
    3 days ago

    Pay the people! I pay every time its an option even when its just complimentary with no additional features.