Jesus Michał "Le Sigh" 🏔 (he)Mar 7

New on #blog: "Money isn’t going to solve the #burnout problem"

"""
The xz-utils backdoor situation brought the problem of FLOSS maintained burnout into the daylight. This in turn lead to numerous discussion on how to solve the problem, and the recurring theme was funding maintenance work.

While I’m definitely not opposed to giving people money for their FLOSS work, if you think that throwing some bucks will actually solve the problem, and especially if you think that you can just throw them once and then forget, I have bad news for you: it won’t. Surely, money is a big part of the problem, but it’s not the only reason people are getting burned out. It’s a systemic problem, and it’s in need of systemic solution, and that’s involves a lot of hard work to undo everything that’s happened in the last, say, 20 years.

But let’s start at the beginning and ask the important question: why do people make free software?
"""

https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2026/03/07/money-isnt-going-to-solve-the-burnout-problem/

#FreeSoftware #OpenSource #AI #NoAI #LLM #NoLLM #Gentoo

Money isn’t going to solve the burnout problem

The xz-utils backdoor situation brought the problem of FLOSS maintained burnout into the daylight. This in turn lead to numerous discussion on how to solve the problem, and the recurring theme was …

Michał Górny
Show threadTaran Rampersad

@mgorny 1/ this is an outstanding writeup.

I miss the days of just me and a gnucc hacking some code out to solve a problem.

The changes started right around when OSI did (correlation, not causation). Ballmer was still shouting about developers so companies would be stuck with legacy code that tied them to Microsoft.

First it was all the different licenses.
Then it was all the new languages that everyone wanted to do something with and left orphaned legacy code.

And yeah, at the same time...

Mar 7 at 9:29pmMastodon for Android
Show threadTaran RampersadMar 7

@mgorny 2/ ... work did get worse because of all the shitty ms legacy codebases and ms dbas I wanted at times to strangle.

.net was supposed to bridge, and it just became more crap with mono.

So while you're trying to handle new frameworks and some legacy code, companies sold out adap to get out from under it. Suddenly, you need to know new frameworks.

Sisyphean churn.

Yup. That's the tension. Straddling all that crap.

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