FOSS devs are burning out, quitting, and even sabotaging their own projects
I&#x27;m an open source maintainer. I have a different take. Yes many projects lack funding, but I&#x27;m hesitant to ask for funding for my projects. Because: what sort of social contract would it imply if people fund me? Should funders be elegible for faster response times? Should their feature requests be implemented with more priority, or must they guaranteed to be implemented? What are the expectations of me? Can I take an extended holiday and go offline for a while? None of this is well-specified.<p>One can argue that funds are donations and thus are free from attached strings, but psychology doesn&#x27;t work that way. Funders will feel entitled to <i>something</i>, but what? You can see this pattern more obviously in Patreon: donors get something in return, such as faster access to content. So even though it&#x27;s a &quot;donation&quot;, people psychologically still experience it as a trade.<p>With Phusion Passenger, I&#x27;ve commercialized a open source project. The contract is clear: if you pay then we both know exactly what to expect from each other.<p>Formalizing the expectations to funders of my other open source projects, effectively turns those projects commercial. But to me, the appeal of my other projects is just that I can code on my own leisure, as a hobby, and give a gift to the community at the same time. It sucks that I have very little time for that because I work on those projects in my free time only, but I&#x27;m hesitant to turn those projects into &quot;work&quot; where I have to give guarantees in return for money.