Can you explain a bit more how it worked great for the bulk of maintainers / authors who don't see any return on their work, burn out and have to do something else?
And for communities, and for sponsoring companies, and for some (although not all) authors.
> if you ignore bombs like this logging bug destroying Western civilization.
...yeah, no; a library had a bug. Somehow, Western civilization is still here.
> Can you explain a bit more how it worked great for the bulk of maintainers / authors who don't see any return on their work, burn out and have to do something else?
Can you explain why you think the majority of authors/maintainers burn out?
That was exploited since April
https://github.com/nice0e3/log4j_POC
... this 'bug' is RCE on the logging infrastructure.
> Can you explain why you think the majority of authors/maintainers burn out?
Please try maintaining a popular FOSS project for a few years and explaining to your wife why you neither have any money nor have any time.
And yet, Western civilization is still here.
>> Can you explain why you think the majority of authors/maintainers burn out?
> Please try maintaining a popular FOSS project for a few years
The majority of projects aren't popular, so you're comparing apples to oranges. For many, I suspect most, projects, the user base is tiny and low pressure.
I don't understand this argument. Nobody starts an open source project - and posts it in the open to share freely - expecting to make any money. Are there even any significant amount of projects with a donation or a Patreon page?
Webnovels I read on RoyalRoad all have it and are much more successful that I would ever have thought given that the stories are all coimpletely free and all any one who pays a story author gets is a few chapters ahead of others, but I can't remember any of the numerous OS projects I use one way or another to even try to make any money.
I did see burnout in some projects. I once joined as co-maintainer of a medium sized project and was left as the sole maintainer because the main author just up and left and was unreachable (we only heard of him again over a year later, and he never touched that particular project again).
All the stories I saw had nothing to do with money at all though, just getting fed up with the expectations. In "my" project's case it also was the large amount of complexity and technical debt that made the original owner's attempts at adding and/or refactoring a huge time sink, and he probably would have been better off to start again from scratch (it's what happens after adding more and more features in a complex cross-mobile phone platform library project's code).
None of those "disillusioned open source maintainer" stories I saw ever included any attempt of making money with it. Disappointment of not being able to get money from anyone only ever comes from people starting a commercial project (a new company), if that kind of disappointment exists for freely shared open source software then I must have missed all instances of such a thing happening.
> It has certainly 'worked great' for leeches, if you ignore bombs like this logging bug destroying Western civilization.
All of life and especially commercial life in anything slightly sophisticated or at scale is "muddling through" to some degree. The same as biological life actually.
So overall I agree with the previous statement that it worked quite well. Nobody should be called a "leech" for using projects that were meant to be shared openly and freely, given the license and method of distribution (e.g. freely on Gitlab or Github).
Yes, it would be very good if more people started to contribute to software they depend on, but to call them "leeches" is not only against the spirit of free software, it is counterproductive as it will probably lead people to the idea that proprietary/closed source is better.
No... projects want contribution more than money, the idea of paying the author is that they can then continue to contribute in the long term by proxy for the payers.
But FOSS-systemwide, I give much more than I take. It just needs leechers, who systemwide, give nothing back, to do the same.
If you ask five different people to evaluate your contributions, how much would they agree? How much would these people be interested in contributing as well and/or paying for you to keep doing what you are doing?
The point I am trying to make: people express their preferences differently, and that is a Good Thing (tm). Market dynamics are a Good Thing (tm). Each of these critical RCEs work as shock on the whole ecosystem which makes it a little bit stronger. I'd rather have a dozen of RCEs on popular-but-amateurish maintained projects than a little totalitarian forcing everyone to "stop being a leech".
"Look around and notice how the world actually works"...