What's wrong with Open Source right now?

[mixmix]

This is a thread for surfacing all of the problems that exist with FOSS right now.

Yes this is a bum-out thread.
Why? If we have a more complete picture of what each other are experiencing, I think this well help resource us to have better conversations about where you should go next, and how

Ways you could add to this thread:
✔️ personal experiences from working in open-source
✔️ challenges you've experienced resourcing open-source
✔️ links to prior art/ analysis on this topic
...

Please share a little about your context along with any stories / assertions. i.e. how much open-source do you contribute to or use?

This thread is not for:
❌ coming up with solutions
❌ complaining about this module

[traverseda]

A lot of people go into free-software with the expectation that it's going to make them money. It's great that some people can make money developing free software but I'm worried that that kind of profit motive is ultimately going to create more issues then the money solves.

As a developer if you don't try to extract value from me I won't try to extract value from you. If that's a problem then I highly encourage you to make non-free software. Of course trying to extract value from profit-motivated entities is legitimate.

[mixmix]

Maintenance is hard work, and thankless.

Example: @dominictarr + event-stream
Results in bad feelings, security problems, drama : https://gist.github.com/dominictarr/9fd9c1024c94592bc7268d36b8d83b3a

[marvindanig]

Moving the thread to Github from Twitter.

Licensing is from the 80s! Although Blueoak Council (https://blueoakcouncil.org) seems to have come up with a more up-to-date robust option, we need a way to prevent large corporations from taking control of OSS ecosystems like it is these days. #oss

[mixmix]

Open Source is kinda foundationally a game for people who are either already pretty well off / stable, or choose to live a very minimalistic life (which not all people can afford to do).

At best we lack a range of perspectives informing what we're growing, at worst we're perpetuating the erasure of different sorts of knowledge and organising. (see: more colonisation)

---

My context informing this: I write and consume open source code. I've been trying to make a p2p project I work on more accessible to Indigenous people. I've been humbled and embarrassed at how naive I've been. What I see as an "open and easy to engage with" space is to others no at all safe. If they are hardy enough to enter, they are doing it with scraps of time around looking after family that's been systemically abused, or holding down multiple jobs. Meanwhile I get to be defining the future of what digital identity looks like....

[traverseda]

Sorry, you're comparing the lack of interest in profit-motivated free software, the rejection of capitalism, to colonialism and saying that by trying to keep capitalism out we're also keeping oppressed people out?

I think you're going to have to elaborate on that point, because I'm having a very hard time understanding your point. I'd be interested in hearing more specifically how you think the broader free software community being more accepting of capitalism and profit-motives will end up helping the under-privileged and oppressed. In my experience the opposite tends to happen.

[modeco80]

This is a thread for surfacing all of the problems that exist with FOSS right now.
Yes this is a bum-out thread.
Why? If we have a more complete picture of what each other are experiencing, I think this well help >resource us to have better conversations about where you should go next, and how

You want what's wrong, I'll give you what's wrong and be honest about it.

This project. There. Bitch at me all you want, you know it's the honest truth.

[dabockster]

I believe most of FOSS's problems can be traced to one core issue: it's free-as-in-beer. This means that, in practice, billions of people download a FOSS program/package but never contribute back to it at all because there's no personal incentive for them to do so. Open source is a great example of the free-rider problem in economics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

Bottom line is that very few people will contribute to FOSS unless they're getting something for themselves out of it. Like what other people have said, the devs/orgs currently heavily contributing to FOSS are well off financially, live frugally, and/or not in the traditional workforce (eg disabled, unemployed, etc). I almost never see 8-5 type devs contributing because there's nothing in it for them to sacrifice their family time besides the possibility of them preventing a cyberattack or something. I mean, there's a reason why the largest FOSS contributors are big tech employees, and it's not about how smart they are (they're pretty damn smart, though).

One possible solution off the top of my head would be to create a license that forces whoever uses it to contribute back or have the license voided.

[norcalli]

You javascript devs never fail to impress and disgust me. You act like you invented open source and then say there's a massive problem with it.

I don't contribute to open source with any expectation of money, nor do I want any expectation of it to poison the good work that has been done. Open source has existed for DECADES and is the bedrock of much of the software everyone uses and it has done so with its existing model. All that has changed is that programming has become more popular and it's been influxed with greedy nonsense since peopl realized you can make a quick buck from it. Do you really think that a greedy npm package spammer is going to solve a problem he's declared as existing?

Sure, it would be nice to get paid for open source work, but it's not a problem. Plenty of people continue to volunteer their time just fine.

The real problem is thay you want money for the work you do and you're trying to invent a crisis to justify it.

[mr21]

People should stop developing B2B dependencies for free. That's it.
Why do so many devs code things they do not even need personnaly?

If you are maintaining a dependence, then you should ask for money each time an issue is created while you don't need it. Or you could wait the time YOU need it to code it.

The term "open source" is became so much equals to "free work for commercial business" than if Facebook.com open source itself, people would not understand why it's would be a good thing because npm install facebook.js would not make any sense...

At the beginning Open Source was an idea of a guy disapointed by the fact that his printer was dead and not open source to understand the problem... a printer is B2C.

Only companies should do B2B stuff for free, for example React is free but what would be the Facebook's reputation inside the devs circle around the world if React/Flux was not a thing? What would be AirBnB's without their .eslintrc? just a famous house website.

But where is the advantage of maintening any react-dependencies if you are not a fb's employee? the fame?

[davalapar]

I think a better question is "what has worked"?

• Code layout briefers & contributing processes
  • Helps the user grok the code; understand the components within a project and how do they work with each other
  • Examples: material-ui.com
• Issue & PR templates & process
  • Helps the user provide an in-depth overview of the problem
  • Helps the maintainers review submitted fixes
  • Examples: material-ui.com
• Community endpoints
  • Lets the user reach out to other users first before reaching out to maintainers; e.g. on spectrum, reddit, stackoverflow
  • Examples: react, material-ui.com
• Sponsorship endpoints
  • Lets the user shell-out some cash (patreon, opencollective, etc) if they got some extra
  • Examples: material-ui.com
• Free support
  • Maintainer just provides ideas / feedbacks on other people's attempts to fix problems
  • Examples: sindresorhus commenting reviews on PR's submitted by other people
• Paid commercial support
  • Maintainer provides dedicated support / consulation at some price
  • Examples: alexhultman on uwebsockets
• Enterprise products
  • Maintainer separates high-maintenance features into a separate product
  • Examples: antirez on redis enterprise
• Infrastructure sponsorship
  • Maintainers accept infrastructure sponsorships from companies to reduce their overhead
  • Examples: material-ui.com with circleci, netlify, browserstack, codecov etc

Ya see there are lots of ways to reduce your overhead if you really love OSS, and a big part of it is having clear boundaries between the maintainers and the users.

Technically, not all of these are applicable in all projects (specially in small libraries/modules) but generally the gist is:

1. Maintainer could be overestimating the demand for a certain project
2. Maintainer hypes a project so much that he attracts many users; but clearly lacks on documentation for users to understand the code, and processes for users to contribute
3. Downstream users are being overdemanding instead of being empathic on maintainers when they're just being lazy since they can just fork the project and fix the problem to temporarily handle their use case

I personally think cli ads are somewhat extreme and borderline obtrusive just like how some maintainers put wes bos javascript course referral links on their project readme's. Which is understandable to a degree since a nigga has to eat, but bloody hell it's icky as fuck for me.

If you want your users to give you money for what they're demanding, I think it's better to be upfront and proactive enough about it to reach a win-win; instead of letting yourself endure unpaid professional hours or letting their user experience suffer, both of which are win-lose.

And come on it's 2019, we should feel free enough to tell freeloaders to fack off.

[mr21]

If you cannot maintain it, give it to the community.

@simonwep, It's already to the community.. anyone can fork anything

[simonwep]

@mr21 Yeah, but it seems like he tries really hard to squeeze money out of it. Really, standard is basically just a eslint config, that this doesn't get the "support" like webpack is not really surprising. It's terrible enough, that this package is already used by so may other packages. Just think about every os developer would do this... And he can still get paid work, there is for sure someone who wants to maintain it with passion - and hopefully doesn't get such awful ideas like this.

There are already ad-block packages like this - do we really want to end this like browsers do? Like, umatrix for npm or what?