Less money is more stressful, open source maintainers are in a dilemma, more than half have exited or are considering exiting

In April of this year, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman angered the entire university for submitting code containing bugs by researchers from the University of Minnesota, causing heated discussions. In addition to these codes that may cause security issues, Kroah-Hartman also pointed out that code maintainers "need to deal with a lot of actual work", and intentional introduction of malicious code will waste the maintainers' time and energy.

Not long ago, the open source project Babel, which has millions of users, fell into financial trouble, which made people pay more attention to the survival of open source projects.

It is difficult to be an open source project, and even more difficult to be an open source project maintainer. Recently, Tidelift, a provider of open source software management solutions, conducted a survey.

Less money: almost half of code maintainers have no salary

Maintaining open source code is an important and stressful task. However, Tidelift's survey revealed that almost half of the code maintainers of

The work of open source maintainers is heavy. Developers fix bugs and create features, reviewers check the code, and finally the code falls on the maintainer. They are responsible for a large amount of continuous work in open source projects, and in general, there are more developers than reviewers, and more reviewers than maintainers. If an open source project is a band, then the maintainer is the conductor. When a bug is missed, they are responsible for fixing it; when a code has not been reviewed, they will review it. For large projects like Linux, there are usually hundreds of code patches, which requires a week of maintenance time.

The work of open source maintainers is so heavy, they will surely receive enough compensation, right? If you think this way, you are wrong. A new survey by Tidelift found that 46% of open source project maintainers are not paid at all, while only 26% of paid people earn more than $1,000 a year. Tidelift's survey of less than 400 maintainers found that nearly half of the maintainers were unpaid volunteers.

Then why would they choose to be maintainers? The survey shows that there are three main factors:

• Have a positive impact on the world (71%);
• Satisfy the need for creative, challenging and/or enjoyable work (63%);
• Able to do projects that are important to oneself (59%).

For developers, these reasons are not surprising.

Recently, the Open Source Security Foundation (OSSF) and Harvard University Innovation Laboratory (LISH) led by the Linux Foundation to establish a report on the free and open source software contributor survey in 2020 showed that the primary reason for developers to participate in the project is to add the required The function or repair of the used program, followed by learning and satisfying the need for creative or enjoyable work. The last factor to consider is compensation.

However, getting paid is still important, whether you are a developer, reviewer or maintainer. After all, feelings alone cannot survive.

Although remuneration ranks the bottom of the maintainer's consideration factors (21%), after in-depth research on the data, we can find that the reason is that they are not paid, so they have not considered it too much. The survey found that although only 18% of people with an annual salary of less than $1,000 said that getting paid is their reason for being a maintainer, those who get paid more hold a different view. For example, among those with an annual salary of more than $10,000, 61% believe that salary is equally important.

Donald Fischer, CEO and co-founder of Tidelift, said: “The entire world relies on open source components to drive applications. However, our data shows that those open source maintainers who create and keep open source functioning well are not saved by the great value they provide. Get proper compensation. The path to a safer and healthier open source software supply chain should begin with ensuring that more volunteer maintainers get adequate compensation."

Too many things: thankless

Even if maintainers can have a lot of fun in open source maintenance work, things are always changing, and there is only a thin line between love and hate.

In addition to the lack of financial returns, maintaining an open source project usually means a lot of pressure, and even a thankless . For example, how many times have you told a programmer that the patch cannot be accepted because he/she does not have RTFM? Would you like to hear developers insist that their code is exactly what the project needs (when in fact its code is flawed)?

Nearly half of the respondents (49%) believe that “not getting enough financial compensation for their work” is the primary reason for dislike being a maintainer, followed by “increased personal pressure” (45%), and “feeling yourself Not fully appreciated or thanked" (40%).

In fact, more than half (59%) of the maintainers surveyed by maintainers deal with, the more likely they are to consider exiting - of the maintainers who manage 10 or more projects, more than two-thirds (68%) have exited or are considering exiting.

Some developers, such as Salvatore Sanfilippo, the creator of the popular NoSQL database Redis, choose not to be maintainers anymore. They would rather be developers than managers. 60% of the respondents believe that the most likely reason for abandoning maintenance projects is "there have been other higher priority things in my life and work", which is usually to make money from the main business.

It takes a lot of work to make the life of open source maintainers easier. and paying for the actual work would be a good starting point .

Reference link: https://www.zdnet.com/article/hard-work-and-poor-pay-stresses-out-open-source-maintainers/