Mastodawn

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

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mirabilos Mar 7

@mgorny yes. This. All of this. Literally all of the blogpost is something I feel. (And I raised the "money needs to come in, guaranteed safely, or I couldn’t give up my job" point often enough.) All of what you write about the burning down FOSS (whether by oxydisation/rusting or by literally burning down the planet/"AI"), too. You speak for me here.

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Laurent Bercot

@mirabilos @mgorny Same. I don't feel the doom and gloom too acutely because my community is awesome, I work at a low enough level to be isolated from the most glaring problems, and I got lucky (after decades of toil!) with funding, but it's definitely there and I subscribe 100% to what @mgorny says as well.