I am actually looking forward to hearing from the people here. Yeah Low-effort I know.
But I think this is an important topic to discuss, considering how much of the FOSS community is kept afloat by unpaid & volunteer-labour.
I am especially looking forward to any discussions of possible solutions
In Germany there is some movement on this topic:
- The Prototype Fund (funds small FOSS projects)
- The Sovereign Tech Agency and Sovereign Tech Fund (funds companies, communities and individual contributors that commit to several fundamental FOSS projects like Maven)
- Zendis (the Centre for Digital Sovereignty, that is for example contracting several FOSS companies like Next Cloud to build an office software suite called Open Desk for the German administration)
I still want FFmpeg to send google a $100 million invoice, exclusively for GPL violations in Chrome.
Maintainers quitting is definitely a loss for everyone. However, we all have the source code. Hard fork and someone new takes up the mantle. Almost guaranteed to happen if the project is important enough.
As a foss project maintainer i think a lot of people underestimate how few people are willing to take over and maintain a project.
Furthermore I think a lot of people underestimate the time and effort it takes to maintain a project.
We see foss projects dying all the time, despite the code being available!
I want to be a maintainer and help out but I just know it’ll be exhausting. I swap languages/projects all the time. I was on the DB (OLAP), architecture, GenAI and DevOps teams just this year alone. The context switching is really bad. I still would like to contribute but I’d want to pick a project that I used semi-regularly and it’s hard to identify when I’m so scatter-brained :/
I agree with you in general. Many small projects with limited popularity are one heartbeat away from disappearing forever. However, projects that are absolutely essential to prevent “collapse” as the video suggests will almost certainly find new life. Red Hat, Google, Canonical, Valve, Synology etc. that all rely heavily on open source projects will pump cash to keep them alive if it comes to that. It’s not true across the board universally, but in general collapse is not imminent.
it’s never as simple as that. Sure you can take it over to continue maintaining it but you now also have to stay on top of git issues. I’ve known maintainers who are the only ones on a fork they took over so not only are they continuing to develop they’re now also the only one dealing with issue requests which can easily derail you from development. Sure there are ways to handle that and schedule it but a lot of people don’t do that and get burned out.
I mean I dealt with this myself. several months ago I built an extension for firefox that tied into lemmy and mastodon and I just abandoned it. I was spending more time dealing with users than actually working on it and just said screw it, this isn’t fun. So now I just make all my repos private.
Yeah, not great. You always hope that projects under a larger foundation, like GNOME, have a higher bus factor¹, but unless that foundation has dispensible income to pay someone, you’re ultimately still reliant on volunteers and not many people volunteer for maintenance.
What the foundation can do, though, which is also really important, is to hand over the keys to a new maintainer, should you disappear over night.
Like, yeah, forking is great, but some people will never learn of the fork. It happens about once a year that I find someone online who’s still using OpenOffice and that project has been practically dead since 2011.
So, I do hope we can get more open-source projects under some sort of umbrella. No idea how to actually do that, though. I also have open-source projects where I would not even know where to start to get them under some organization…… Open office is dead ? I installed it least than an year ago on my parent computer…
I almost expected someone to learn that just from me posting. 😅
Basically, OpenOffice used to be organized by Sun Microsystems. Then Sun got bought by Oracle back in 2010.
Oracle does not have a good reputation at all, so the OpenOffice devs from back then figured they’d need to take things into their own hands and set up The Document Foundation to organize further development. But the OpenOffice trademark was owned by Sun/Oracle, so they had to rename and get a new homepage and everything. The name they chose is LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/After the OpenOffice project was effectively dead, Oracle handed it and its trademark over to the Apache Foundation, where it’s seeing occasional bug fixes. But to my knowledge, they don’t even have the capacity to fix all the security problems.
All the actual feature development happens over on the LibreOffice side.So, in practice, if you want OpenOffice, what you really want is LibreOffice.
It’s not dead, it’s run by Apache now. But LibreOffice is much more active and widely used.
As the economy fucks over the masses more and more in the late stage of capitalism, time for volunteering/hobbies will reduce.
Much like with Wikipedia, what’s needed is to centralize, work together on standards, and stop branching off with DIY.
Don’t you mean De-Centralize
The power, maybe. Maybe our efforts should be collective, though; one wiki maintained by many is probably better than a lotta wikis maintained individually.
Unless you’re doing a joke, in which case haha yeah capitalists can centralize deez
