- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
Thought this was really insightful and think more people should read this
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Money isn’t going to solve the burnout problem
In my opinion, the biggest source of burnout is actually our dayjobs.
Respectfully and meant humorously, WTF are you talking about then.
Yes money can solve it. It can solve FOSS devs needing a day job, it can solve not having enough people to do deal with FOSS related nonsense.
I’m really annoyed when people say that and somehow have “shame” when it comes to demanding, let’s say, $50 million from FANG to maintain their project. Just ask. And then because of that shame, they think “asking for money” is asking a few fellow FOSS enjoyers for $1-5 a month and then that amounts to like $3.50 and then yeah of course that won’t solve any problems.
Michał addresses his problems with relying on donations later on in the post. Dayjobs are the main source of burnout but devs need it to survive. It’s very difficult for a FOSS project to get enough consistent funding to pay a liveable wage for even one dev without compromising on some aspects to gain funding. And even if they do, the FOSS work now becomes the dayjob and becomes a source of burnout. Ontop of this, donations are extremely unstable and there’s no guarantee a project will be able to pay a dev enough every year.
I think part of the problem is that Linux basically supports every use case. Sometimes the scope needs to reduce, older hardware needs to be abandoned, etc.
The article cites some hardware being incompatible with Rust as part of the issue, but perhaps what needs to change is that a line in the sand needs to be drawn over which hardware is accepted. The legacy hardware can be left to the forks developed by paid employees for their businesses own personal use.
Linux doesn’t need to become as hardline on hardware as Windows 11, but the distros where the maintainers are at risk of burnout can certainly afford to abandon at least some hardware. Apparently Rust doesn’t support alpha (1992-2007), hppa (1986-2008), ia64 (2001-2019), m68k (1979-1994), or s390 (1990-2004). All of these are at least 18 years old, with the exception of ia64, but apparently the Linux kernel already dropped support in 2024.
In a side node: when building for geentoo it should be possible to build all rust libs as dylib. The compiler only offers a stable abi for the same version and all flags being equal. When building everything yourself that should work at the coat of updating the compiler requiring a complete rebuild of all libs.
