> The economics of open source are fundamentally broken.
Open source is not about economics in the first place. If your motives are fundamentally economic, then you are in the wrong place, and you should probably do something else instead - or you will become as frustrated as this author seems to be.
> crushed under the weight of entitled users
This will only happen if you allow it to happen. Nobody can force you to carry this burden. You do not owe the users anything, and you are free to ignore their gripes.
It's not like the users of paid products are any less entitled, or obnoxious about their opinions.
While I agree with the gist of your reply, I would make one amendment:
"open source" _is_ typically an economic endeavor, or maybe more accurately a financial one.
"free software" is typically not intended for productized distribution, and I think more accurately expresses what you''re saying above.
The original "free software" model was development by user/developers, who started with the motivation to make s/w that they wanted/needed to use. The software is then distributed to other users, for possible modification, or just for end use. This was intended to facilitate the freedom of the user, by not being bound by the profit motive of a corporate developer, but instead benefiting from the user serving motivations of user/developers.
Many businesses had issues with the "user freedom" orientation of free software, and created the moniker "open source". Which is unlike free software in the sense that it is often for the purpose of creating a for profit product. For profit is fine, as a concept, but it often causes the motives of the developers (or their controlling managers) to be oriented towards the advantages provided to a product vendor, instead of advantages provided explicitly for end users. Things like user tracking and data exfiltration are examples of these non-user motives,
This is all somewhat of an aside. Your statements above about not taking other people's criticisms onboard are very valid. Just the fact that a developer would feel pressured by these demands does indicate a caring personality. Finding a balance between caring and not being overwhelmed is a current issue that many developers are trying to resolve.
You make a good point. I suppose that when I say "open source" what I really mean is more like "free software, but not necessarily the GPL", because that's what I care about, while I don't care much about businesses or their concerns: but you are right, this does ignore some of the term's broader meaning and the motivations people had for establishing it.
Again, a big misconception that you do Open Source for money and to get rich.
Also, the maintainers "burnt" listed in this blog post got pissed off because they can't control another project ("linux"), that doesn't belong to them or was created by them, to go in a specific direction that they would like.
I blame this on the recent development of "open source as a marketing strategy". I'm getting tired of "open source" products that have restrictive licenses, or that are open source but lock features behind paywalls and subscription plans. It seems open source is just an excuse to ask for "stars" and to get some good will from potential users.
The Open Source world has become what the startup world became: more posers than supporters.
If you're worried that people will steal your code, your idea, or use your product for free, then don't claim it's "open source" and say "source available for auditing purposes" and start paying for contributions.
There are many nuances as to why open source exists first place and narcissistic drive is very often not considered although most open source projects are very much an open portfolio of the authors.
Also overlooked the fact that in 2025 open source directly feeds into training sets and this has implications and contradictory effects.
I did a research on the reasons why open source exists and what motivates people to do it and was fascinated how the different goals and motivators for open source are mixed up in some free4all amalgama in peoples’ minds.
>For everyone else, open source becomes a one-way relationship: all giving, little receiving
For me, open source is like making a painting and hanging it on a wall where others can see it. I will never lose a single second of sleep over whether someone else likes it or not.
I would never take money for an open source project unless I was prepared to work on it full time. It would give me a sense of responsibility which I don't want.
Normalize maintaining your own fork if upstream doesn't agree with you. It takes me 5 minutes per year to rebase some projects where I wanted them to work differently than the maintainers had envisioned.
This is a somewhat idealistic/naive view. If your project is even mildly successful and you get motivated to keep contributing to it more and more and form a strong community soon the leechers arrive. They start demanding more and more for literally nothing in return under the pretence that it's in the best interest of the project to add the features they want and to accelerate development.
It soon becomes exhausting to deal with them on a regular basis while still feeling good about contributing. People are faster to demand rather than appreciate and you start wondering what the point of all this is.
So yes, if you end up painting something that's like a high school project, sure, it's easy to leave it on the wall and not care. But if your painting starts getting displayed in galleries and there's a little "demand" for it, everything becomes a headache.
> in return under the pretence that it's in the best interest of the project to add the features they want and to accelerate development.
Which is why you shouldn't work under false pretenses. You willing to turn that project into a day job? No? Then tell them no. You owe them nothing. You've already done more than your "fair share" giving to the community by publishing open source code, no matter how good (or not) it is, or how many "galleries" it hangs in (or not). They have a problem? Well, by definition it's their problem, not yours. Let them own it, fork it, and solve it, if it's such a big deal.
"No" is how you set expectations and maintain integrity. You only have so many resources in a day. Don't become a load bearing internet person for free.
I have to admit, it's one of my guilty pleasures to tell people "no" when they ask for unreasonable things from me. Haven't had the luck of managing a large open source project, but the prospect of saying "no" to an overwhelming stream of demands excites me.
The big difference is that there are former house guests that will go back into the house, the door is never locked, take the painting, sell it on renowed art gallery, without giving anything back to you.
And this started to be a quite common practice nowadays.
How does that affect me? (Ignoring the difference in copying software vs physical things)
If people are willing to pay him, that means he must be fulfilling some market demand that I'm not interested in dealing with, be it marketing, support or something else.
Some paint owners feel offended that folks get into their house, even though they left the door open, take the painting away, and didn't got any cut back from the gallery.
At Distrust we freely license every line of code we legally can right down to our website and infra repo. We also exclusively do our work with local and self hosted FOSS as well.
Our code and docs are always free but they happen on our terms by default. If you want to accelerate development of features that benefit your org, or if you want hands on support, or security advice, or you want your code reviewed quickly, etc, we offer retainer contracts.
Able to support 3 employees full time, knock on wood.
“and in return watch your passion get crushed by entitled users who are never satisfied” is absolutely not unique to open source software. Both free but not open tools & services and commercial ones, suffer the same fate. To quote H2G2:
> To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
The issue is human nature, from two directions:
1. Some people expect the moon on a stick, and will be arseholes if they do not get it.
2. Some people are far too giving, to the detriment of their own sanity, and generally realise they are doing this to themselves when it is too late, beyond the point where just stepping back a little bit is sufficient to help the situation.
It isn't a new thing either:
I had some software out there decades ago, back when shareware was a thing. The free version did everything but left a small watermark, so people could fully test it before paying or just keep using it for free if they didn't care about the watermark. I gave it up because dealing with people simply wasn't worth it, and it wasn't those that paid who were the issue: the real arseholes were those who hadn't. For instance, some of them took “if you don't like it, or find my need to eat/sleep/study makes my free support response too slow for you, maybe use something else?” as a direct personal attack on their rights & freedoms. Given how much more nasty the net is today compared to the relatively nice & naive times back then I hate to think what project maintainers get now. When I gave it up I first stopped taking payments (but kept supporting those that had already paid), then released it Open Source (GPL IIRC) and a couple of people jumped on and tried to make a thing of it, but those projects quickly faded as those people didn't have time and/or couldn't put up with the people either, after which I declared it public domain and let my online copies of it die when I moved ISP soon after.
I got out quick, before it became too stressful, but some end up sinking more and more time into things instead.
You value various objects. I value various objects. It is possible to aggregate the things that you or I value. I submit that saying we value them together is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division, especially at scale.
Which doesn't refute the original post at all. Besides being pleasant, one should contribute to projects where possible. Consider becoming an FSF member, if nothing else.
thank you very much for this observation. every time i see a comment on here asking "how are we supposed to use this?" or such, in response to a post of a software tool, it makes me want to punch the screen. It's like they are trying to sound intelligent but instead end up coming across as insipid.
Rather primitive article. TLDR: dev got into an open source project, "received nothing", was fed up with user complaints, and left => open source is fundamentally broken, "most maintainers never see a dime for their efforts"!
Dear author, look up how the OS landscape works, have more realistic expectations, and maybe a better work-life balance.
Let’s list 3 reasons people do open source and break down each one.
1. As a portfolio to get paid work - great!
2. Community cred - very dangerous - a recipe for burnout as described in the article. Maintainers tend to over-extend themselves and there’s no resource allocation signals (no $$$ in other words) to right-size their efforts. Insisting on support contracts is a good mitigation as it allows $ to reflect effort, and difficult customers can be politely overcharged and/or fired.
3. For $$$ - futile due to human nature. It’s not rational to pay for something unless you can see the value - eg. why would anyone pay more tax than legally required? Therefore, sponsorships will only be taken up by the tiny minority who take a long enough view to see burnout and want to mitigate that risk for the good of all. But the majority will look at the immediate price of $0, see no future risk, and pay $0. And a small but vocal minority act in ways that burn out the maintainer, destroying their energy to the detriment of everyone. It’s not helped by our financial system, which almost demands that public companies act sociopathically.
Marcan could’ve refused to support anyone without a support contract. And to provide signal about who's using too much support resources, limiting how much support you get on your contract is a great way to right-size things with dollars.
On their struggles with merging Rust code into the kernel, let’s hope Linus can bang enough heads together. Rust has teething problems but the memory-safety it brings is a boon to security. Seeing Greg Kroah-Hartman weigh in and say the kernel devs have achieved tougher things in the past, I have faith.
All is not lost - Marcan has so much love and time and energy invested, if the hostility can be reduced maybe they’ll come back.
Open source is not about economics in the first place. If your motives are fundamentally economic, then you are in the wrong place, and you should probably do something else instead - or you will become as frustrated as this author seems to be.
> crushed under the weight of entitled users
This will only happen if you allow it to happen. Nobody can force you to carry this burden. You do not owe the users anything, and you are free to ignore their gripes.
It's not like the users of paid products are any less entitled, or obnoxious about their opinions.