The social experience of upstream #FLOSS desktop software maintainers:
You're a potato farmer calling out the shop managers who keep moldy potato bags on shelves years past the expiry date, with your farm's brand prominently on the potato bag, and you get yelled at by the janitor for sternly asking the supermarket's management to comply with food safety regulations.
Wait… I just ruined #FreeDesktop devs' fantasy of becoming farmers, did I? 🤔
There's a LOT of you #floss people out there acting all righteous about #AI and #LLMS but when I ask for a simple code review of an important #opensource project, very few real humans show up. Yet this is one of the core tenets of #OpenSource that we care about so much.
To me this is simple, if you don't show up at the code review, or in the PR discussions, your opinions in the end are not worth that much to me. We have to move forward as a project.
Development update for the last two weeks: https://docs.drawpile.net/devblog/2026/05/10/dev-update
Mostly lots of bugfixes before hopefully a 2.3.1-beta.1 release this week.
But otherwise, the Drawpile git repositories have been mirrored to #Codeberg rather than being anchored to GitHub. Both places can be used to report issues and provide pull requests: https://codeberg.org/Drawpile/
Keep things open: it makes things better
#publicmoneypubliccode #floss #foss #PublicTechnology #UK #NHS
Recently, The Document Foundation published an open letter to European citizens. We asked Euro-Office – the new coalition forming around a European alternative for productivity – whether ODF (the Open Document Format) would be its native document format. Unfortunately, we have not yet received a reply, and this confirms – at least in part – the suspicion that Euro-Office will join Microsoft’s allies in a strategy to lock in European citizens, who will see their content snatched away by a company that – in words only – presents itself as a defender of digital sovereignty. With the open letter, we have raised an issue that the general debate is not yet grasping: digital sovereignty is not determined solely by the terms of the licence and the location of the server, but by the format in which documents are created, stored and exchanged. We were able to pose our question publicly, with confidence, because we represent something extremely solid – support for the single open and standard format: ODF – which has been built up over twenty years by many people, whose names rarely appear in press releases. The foundations underpinning the political moment Germany has established by law that ODF
I've been talking before why money won't solve the burnout problem. But let's for a minute assume that you really wanted to help people maintaining #FreeSoftware by paying them. The problem is that:
1. You have to pay them a living wage.
While all monetary help is appreciated by developers, they need a living wage. Not "that should prevent you from starving to death" but the kind of money that can support a honest (but not lavish) lifestyle: pay the bills, feed your family, cover other living costs such as repairs, clothes, appliances, and let you save enough for future emergencies.
It's simple as that. If you can't do that, they're going to need a dayjob. If they're lucky, it won't collide with their #FLOSS work. If they're not, it will kill them. Or they'll fall somewhere in the middle, slowly burning out until they can neither maintain their projects, nor work.
2. You need to guarantee that the payouts will continue.
People need security. They're not going to stay unemployed, let alone quit their job or turn down a job offer, unless they either have good guaranties or substantial savings (or they're in a really bad shape and wouldn't be able to handle the job anyway). The job market is hell, and people just know that when the payments stop, they may not be able to find a job soon, let alone a good job. Even "passively" looking for a job can burn you out.
So yeah, one-off payments and pinky swears won't do. And it isn't even a matter of whether we can trust you; it's a matter if you'll actually be able to continue paying us. And honestly, I don't really know how to solve that. Perhaps by paying up front, but for how long? Finding a job may take more than a year, finding a good job may be once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
3. It can't end up being a job.
Perhaps most difficult of all, these payments can't really come with explicit obligations. I mean, that's the whole point: you want to support FLOSS, not turn it into a corporate project. You want the maintainer to remain free and enjoy the work. That is unlikely to happen if their livelihood is now dependent on your satisfaction. And even if it isn't, I for example would still feel indebted to whoever's paying me to do FLOSS, even if they really didn't expect anything in return, and would fall into a spiral of guilt-inflicted burnout if I failed to maintain the software satisfactorily.
Jeff Fortin T. (風の庭園のNekohayo)
Joachim Wiberg
Drawpile
rival
aproposnix
Arawa - Collab. Open Source
Jesus Michał "Le Sigh" 🏔 (he)
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