Denis Pushkarev, maintainer of the core-js library used by millions of websites, says he’s ready to give up open source development because so few people pay for the software upon which they depend.
“Free open source software is fundamentally broken,” he wrote in a note on the core-js repository. “I could stop working on this silently, but I want to give open source one last chance.”
The issue of who pays for open source software, often created or managed by unpaid volunteers, continues to be a source of friction and discontent in the coding community.
Feross Aboukhadijeh, an open source developer and CEO of security biz Socket, had a lot to say on the subject in an email to The Register:
Maintainers are the unsung heroes of the software world, pouring their hearts into creating vast amounts of value that often goes unappreciated. These unsung heroes perform critical work that enables all of modern technology to function – this is not an exaggeration. These tireless individuals dedicate themselves to writing new features, fixing bugs, answering user inquiries, improving documentation, and developing innovative new software, yet they receive almost no recognition for their efforts.
It is imperative for the commercial industry and open source community to come together and find a way to acknowledge and reward maintainers for their invaluable contributions. As long as significant personal sacrifice is a prerequisite for open source participation, we’ll continue to exclude a lot of smart and talented folks. This isn’t good for anyone.
Maintainers of packages that are not installed directly, such as core-js, which often comes along for the ride when installing other packages, have it especially hard. Reliable, error-free transitive dependencies are invisible. Therefore, the maintainers are invisible, too. Perversely, the better these maintainers do their job, the more invisible they are. No one ever visits a GitHub repository for a transitive dependency that works perfectly – there’s no reason to do so. But a developer investigating an error stack trace might visit the repository if for no other reason than to file an issue. This is the exact problem that the core-js maintainer faced.
For the large companies that get more from the free labor in open source code than they pay out in donations – if indeed they pay out – the status quo looks like a pretty good deal.
For individual developers, however, code creation and maintenance without compensation has a cost – measurable not just in financial terms, but also in social and political capital.
For Pushkarev, known as zloirock on GitHub, the situation is that core-js is a JavaScript library that’s been downloaded billions of times and used on more than half of the top 10,000 websites – but the income he receives from donations has fallen dramatically. When he started maintaining core-js full time he could count on about $2,500 per month, and that’s down to about $400 per month at present.
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Source: Core-js maintainer complains open source is broken
The post then goes on to politicise the guy who is complaining and mention some other stuff from the past – but that does not invalidate the point that many FOSS developers are creating software that businesses profit hugely off and they themselves don’t see a thing for – except random hate.
Robin Edgar
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