Money is not going to solve the burnout problem – Michał Górny

The xz-utils backdoor situation has the problem of FLOSS maintained burnout in the daylight. This in turn led to many discussions about how to solve the problem, and the recurring theme was the financing of maintenance work.

While I am certainly not opposed to give people money for their FLOSS work, if you think that throwing a few dollars 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. Sure, money is a big part of the problem, but it’s not the only reason people burn out. It’s a systemic problem, and it needs a systemic solution, and it 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?

Why make FLOSS?

Well, I can’t speak for everyone, but I can tell you something about people like me. We didn’t get into FLOSS because we expected to earn money from our work. We didn’t publish it because we expected to get some kind of well-paying job, even if we believed it might help. We did FLOSS because we actually enjoy do it

Maybe we just had a creative spark that needed an outlet. Or maybe we found out that we have a talent for it, and we wanted to use it to make the world a little better for others. Or maybe we just needed a tool, and we figured: why not share it?

Of course it could have been a while ago. Maybe we were students with a lot of free time. Or maybe we had a good job. Maybe we were young, healthy, fascinated by technology and relatively free. And we enjoyed the fellowship.

So what changed?

Work-related burnout

In my opinion, the biggest source of burnout is actually our day job. I’m not saying mundane jobs are bad (and I’m really thankful for mine), but many IT jobs have become essentially worse over the years.

Finding time and energy to work on FLOSS while working full-time can be difficult. It’s even harder if that full-time job also involves sitting in front of a monitor. But it’s especially bad if your job also turns to crap in every possible way: maybe you’re overworked, or people around you are toxic, or maybe your employer is getting more and more mean, or maybe you just have a depressing crap job. Some people can actually handle it, and find FLOSS a joyous counterbalance. Others burn out.

Can money solve it? Perhaps. But can you give people enough money to survive, so they can quit their jobs? And can you guarantee that you won’t cut it in a few years, and they’ll suddenly find themselves without a source of income and suddenly have a well work?

And perhaps even more importantly, you can actually do it without effectively turning your FLOSS experience into another bad job? Because even if you promise that you don’t expect them to work full-time on the project, even if you promise that you don’t expect any specific results, it will still bird such as an obligation. And that can take away all the fun.

Of course, some donations can help. Especially if they are “unmarked” donations that are clear signs of appreciation for all the work a person has done. Maybe they will be enough for someone to reduce their working hours (provided their employer really allows it) and have more energy for FLOSS.

Unfortunately, day jobs are not the only problem people face.

VLOOS-related burnout

Software projects do not exist in a vacuum. They create communities around them. And these communities form part of a larger community. Many of us enjoy FLOSS not only because of what we can create, but also because we become part of a large community of people who love FLOSS. Or at least that’s how I used to feel.

It was clear that things were not always perfect. Every community gathers some people with strong opinions, and things can get quite toxic at times. Yet in retrospect you realize that in the end you all shared a common goal: you wanted to make the world a better place. Sure, you may have vehemently disagreed on how to get there, but you can generally agree that you both had a constructive goal.

These days I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s just negative experiences that accumulate, but I feel that the community is gradually getting worse. On the one hand, a number of corporations have figured out that they can treat the FLOSS community as a source of free labor. On the other hand, more and more people are joining the effort to earn money, sell or benefit in some other way. People copy the worst corporate malpractices, or maybe entrepreneurs play along.

The FLOSS world is a world of interdependence, and if you can’t trust that others share roughly the same values ​​as you, how can you not burn out?

Interruption: A Personal Story

Perhaps Linux distribution developers are particularly affected by this because we are effectively dependent on almost every other software project out there that our users might want to use.

I felt it pretty bad when Cryptography Rust begins to require; Rust went against so many principles I believed in. It felt like hundreds saying, “Hey, have you seen this new cool language? Well, it effectively forces us to sell off pinned dependencies, builds take forever and, oh, we’re declaring a quarter of the architectures you supported dead; but hey, it’s open source, you can port Rust to them!”

Of course it sucked, and it still sucks. It’s like a professional wrestler beating you repeatedly, and then telling you that you just have to work out. In your spare time, of course. When you’re not busy doing your day job or get hit. Oh, and the gym moves elsewhere every month, and you have to start over.

So yeah, these days I spend a lot of time dealing with the fallout from projects that embrace Rust. Or maybe just random pure Python packages that decide it would be a great idea to embrace uv buildand requires Rust to build pure Python packages to shave a few milliseconds of wheel build time. It certainly doesn’t contribute to my burning out.

And these days there is the AI ​​bubble. Not surprisingly, many people enjoy telling a machine to spell a lot of crap for them and then publish it. So I file bug reports about the broken code their plagiarism machine generated, and they answer me with more sloppiness. And I do wonder: why do I even bother? And I feel depressed, and burned out.

The sense of responsibility

In the end, when you create something, you are responsible for that.

Maybe not all people feel that way. Perhaps some are perfectly happy to finish a project quickly and sell it before the technical debt arises. Others just like to point out that if you don’t like something, you can always fork it. Because you obviously have a lot of free time and energy to maintain other people’s projects while they are busy spitting on you.

The problem is that responsibility turns a hobby project into a part-time job. Maybe it’s just that the excitement of creating something new is replaced by the tedium of duty. Maybe it turns out that the library you used just made a giant API change that requires major rewriting of your logic. Maybe the task was more complex than you thought, and what worked for you came with many user problems. Maybe the whole design was wrong (but if that’s the case, you might have to rewrite it, and you’ll again feel the thrill for a while, followed by the pain of restoring feature parity). Or maybe you just have that one user who is a real asshole who can make you regret opening your inbox.

Of course, this does not always happen. Sometimes you continue to enjoy working on something. Something that builds a great community around your project. Sometimes you find fellow maintainers that you enjoy working with. And sometimes you finally stop feeling the weight of responsibility: because you know you have other people you can trust, and finally you can leave the project in their hands.

However, this is one more source of burnout that money can’t always fix. In fact, it can make it worse: by confirming that your project is now a part-time job and reinforcing the sense of responsibility. It can help a lot if you can still enjoy working on the project, but just throwing money and making demands will only make things worse.

Epilogue: the spiral

Burnout is a serious problem in FLOSS. What used to be your hobby now becomes a painful responsibility. Your day job may be sucking the life out of you, and your users may be giving you another part-time job. However, the real problem is that it is spiral.

Toxicity leads to burnout. Burnout leads to more toxicity. People don’t want to interact with each other. The community is breaking. A new dynamic is emerging: people no longer want to work together to create better software; they just want to get their job done. They don’t file bugs, they fork. They don’t address bugs, they tell you to fork. They start using LLMs because they no longer want to keep their code. Software turns into slop, which burns out even more people.

It is a cancer that is consuming the FLOSS community that I love so much. And the hardest thing is that resisting takes so much effort. You spend all your energy trying to keep things from falling apart completely, you can’t really devote it to things you enjoy. And once again you burn out.

What can we do? I don’t know. I really don’t know, and it frustrates me to no end. If we just accept it as the “new normal”, maybe we will learn to cope and suffer less. Or maybe the dam breaks and we drown. It’s not a risk I’m willing to take right now, but I don’t know how long I can last.