Scratch that-- I just realized that most of the problems I encounter in FLOSS maintenance consist of explaining/documenting the problem. Once I can refine the question of, "Why is the loader being a butt," to, "Why is the loader recursing 1000 levels deep before bailing?" I'm already 90% of the way to solving the problem.
Re:Ten Years of Worthless Side Projects
by AstralStorm on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @02:40AM
(#14854067)
If it takes a single person about a week to do it and mostly by solving a puzzle, then it is not art again, but craft.
Even writing an OSS project from scratch. It only becomes art if it really is done either clearly superior or is something entirely new. Plus it must be executed really well.
Just as an aside, serious free software maintenance work is not cutting edge and also fulfills your challenge of not being "outsource-able" to a small team of low-wage devs.
Or at least I've always assumed it is. Where can I pay some small amount of money to test and see whether a small team can "fix X without breaking the users' existing programs" for a poorly documented FLOSS interface that depends on undefined behavior in C?