Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

Re:Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore? by chongli on Friday December 24, 2021 @10:09AM (#29674170)

Having your project picked up by commercial users is entirely the problem this heuristic is intended to avoid. It’s also the central problem from the linked article: commercial users take from open source projects and often don’t give anything back. They also tend to externalize any costs they have from use of the project onto the project maintainers.

Maybe you’re okay with being treated the way the log4j maintainers are being treated right now. The whole point is that you shouldn’t be! People producing valuable software in their free time and giving it away for free should be treated with respect and that’s not happening right now. We need to find a solution!

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Re:Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore? by Retric on Friday December 24, 2021 @10:47AM (#29674528)

“Being treated” implies a lot of things.

Someone using something I have written doesn’t cost me anything, but it also doesn’t create any obligations for me. I don’t need to make my contact info public, or have any interactions with users whatsoever.

log4j accepted donations which is really it’s own thing. Running a charity, which is what it means to get paid full time to maintain OSS, has a host of issues that have little to do with OSS and a lot to do with public relations.

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