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 threaddegenerating degenerate

@mgorny Well my observations over the years are that nobody is going to give FOSS maintainers any money, unless you're in a clique. So it's moot if it would help or not.

The section on coding assistants is a self-inflicted wound though. If you spent half a day with https://antigravity.google (it's usable for free but very ratelimited) and your own code on your own machine, with your own choice of tasks, you would not write it off as "slop".

Google Antigravity

Google Antigravity - Build the new way

Google Antigravity
Mar 8 at 5:39amWeb