Kit 🔻 (32)
Major contributors to burnout in open source:
- developers are struggling to a make a living
- toxic behaviour from community members wearing developers down
How about @signalapp ?
Signal has sooo many problems, Oğuz states:
- It's a walled garden
- There's no federation
- Nothing on F-Droid
- Threatened a developer who wanted to fork (apparently? don't have the details on this, just reporting)
- Everything must go through Signal's central servers, which .... as the recent outage shows, use AWS!
Reclaim the web! But how?
this talk by Jah Kosha which may have some answers:
The utopia, according to Margola, would be that everyone who wants to would be able to get paid a full wage for their work
Is this indeed a utopia? Would this be the desirable endpoint? 
Money changes everything. What would this mean for voluntary work?
Some other alternatives for getting money for open source development:
- Crowdfunding and donations, e.g. through github sponsors (Microsoft), open collective
- Government money, e.g. through NLNet
- Donations from companies, such as through Open Source Pledge
- Get regular work time allocated for open source development
Margola discusses 2 models for getting money for free software development:
- Charge for features. This has its problems.
- Open core (≠ FLOSS)
'Open core' is like the free waiting area in an airport, where the full, non-free enterprise version gives you access to the VIP lounge
If you're developing the software in your spare time, you are paying the cost of development upfront.
With your spare time.
Free & open source software development is work, says Manterola.
You may do it because you love it. Because you want to make the world a better place.
But it's still work.
Marga Manterola's raises the issue of burnout:
Free as in Burned Out: Who Really Pays for Open Source?
live now here: https://live.fosdem.org/watch/janson
Digital feudalism is the reality today, argues Özcan Oğuz in their talk.
"You don't need to understand" is the new serfdom. Where people loose their freedoms, privacy, and control
