It’s 11:43pm on a Monday night. My 6-week-old son is asleep in my office so my wife can get some uninterrupted rest for the first half of the night. He’s finally asleep now, and I probably should be also after a full day of work. But I’m not done for the day. Even though I’m a software engineer by trade, I’m also a computer programmer by hobby and passion. So I do what I’ve been doing for well over a decade now: I boot up my computer to write some code.
OP wanted a fun child project, but it’s not fun anymore, just responsibilities.
The problem I see is just a difference between expectations and reality.
Expectations were: it would be fun to give people something for free, create open source, be part of some community. Maybe even get some recognition, maybe better job offers.
Reality is: noone cares about your open source project enough to pay for it.
And such is life. Noone stops you from just stopping working on it, and that’s an adult option. All open source licences have a clause like “I don’t own you nothing”, and maybe that’s the moment to use it.
The corporations ‘doing the right thing’ by subsidizing FOSS are under the same enshittification pressures as the rest of the global economic system, and as a consequence they will sooner or later not be doing the right thing at all.
When you release your software for free you don’t owe anybody a thing. If you’re getting burnt out or it’s impacting your personal life too much then don’t be afraid to stop and hand over control of the project gracefully. The latter is hard to do for most people though, because giving up something you’ve spent so much time and effort on is challenging. However, your irl always comes first.
Burn out and stress applies regardless of whether you get paid for your work or not. Plenty of people feel the same way about their paid jobs too. I think all being paid to continue work on this project will do is prolong the inevitable, that it’s time to move on regardless.
Yep. Same problem we have with AI use of free-to-view literature and art. The author’s intent is often to invite others to participate in a collective effort, and start an ongoing conversation where works can be shared back and forth and everyone improves as a result.
Corpo use of FOSS — and especially ML training on free-to-view works — often takes the fruits of the collective effort and then sprints directly away from the community, refusing to participate and sometimes even wrapping a thin for-profit layer around the free underlying tools.
In the case of AI, this for-profit wrapper is so comprehensive and so thoroughly obscures any reference to the source material that not only can it replace the original communities very effectively, but it denies any ability to navigate through to the original communities even if you wanted to.
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OP wanted a fun child project, but it’s not fun anymore, just responsibilities.
The problem I see is just a difference between expectations and reality.
Expectations were: it would be fun to give people something for free, create open source, be part of some community. Maybe even get some recognition, maybe better job offers.
Reality is: noone cares about your open source project enough to pay for it.
And such is life. Noone stops you from just stopping working on it, and that’s an adult option. All open source licences have a clause like “I don’t own you nothing”, and maybe that’s the moment to use it.
The corporations ‘doing the right thing’ by subsidizing FOSS are under the same enshittification pressures as the rest of the global economic system, and as a consequence they will sooner or later not be doing the right thing at all.
Not everyone is driven by money, some people care about improving computing.
People who are motivated by money have been saying this for decades. And they’re still wrong because not everyone is motivated by money.
How many working people are doing it not because of the money but solely because they enjoy the work?
I dare to say 0.01%. Most devs, including open source devs are payed one way or another.
Sure, there are labours of love. But most aren’t.
When you release your software for free you don’t owe anybody a thing. If you’re getting burnt out or it’s impacting your personal life too much then don’t be afraid to stop and hand over control of the project gracefully. The latter is hard to do for most people though, because giving up something you’ve spent so much time and effort on is challenging. However, your irl always comes first.
Burn out and stress applies regardless of whether you get paid for your work or not. Plenty of people feel the same way about their paid jobs too. I think all being paid to continue work on this project will do is prolong the inevitable, that it’s time to move on regardless.
Yep. Same problem we have with AI use of free-to-view literature and art. The author’s intent is often to invite others to participate in a collective effort, and start an ongoing conversation where works can be shared back and forth and everyone improves as a result.
Corpo use of FOSS — and especially ML training on free-to-view works — often takes the fruits of the collective effort and then sprints directly away from the community, refusing to participate and sometimes even wrapping a thin for-profit layer around the free underlying tools.
In the case of AI, this for-profit wrapper is so comprehensive and so thoroughly obscures any reference to the source material that not only can it replace the original communities very effectively, but it denies any ability to navigate through to the original communities even if you wanted to.