Quote of the week

[Posted April 23, 2025 by corbet]

Today, I stepped down as the co-maintainer of the PCI subsystem. [...]
Sadly, I was unable to pursue my life goal of securing a job where I could be paid to work on Linux kernel. Seems that nobody wants to hire maintainers nowadays, and the hardware industry is almost impenetrable nowadays.
Thus, yesterday, after I completed a call about KernelCI feedback from fellow kernel developers and maintainers in the middle of my night, I saw another angry e-mail in my inbox from some developer who complained about how outrageous it was that their patch hasn't yet been merged and it has been a day since he sent it! Aside, of course, from people who whinge to me on IRC all the time, I feel like a therapist these days... alas.
This broke me. It was 3 am, and I was tired. The work is very gratifying, and I love every bit of it, but ultimately it's unpaid, not very glorious, quite stressful (try to accidentally break linux-next, see what happens), and nobody cares about you; there are only demands from people for things to be merged.
So, as Rob Herring put it recently... This "Patch Monkey" needs a break. And since there aren't holidays or sabbaticals to take for kernel maintainers, I had no choice but to step down, I suppose.

— Krzysztof Wilczyński (thanks to Vegard Nossum)

I applaud this maintainer

Posted Apr 24, 2025 10:39 UTC (Thu) by highvoltage (subscriber, #57465) [Link]

As many would, I feel some sympathy toward this maintainer and hope they can turn this around.

But above that, this is the correct attitude to have. Why should you work for free and keep taking abuse from impatient, entitled people?

There needs to be more appreciation for people who do all the work, not more abuse.

I know that feeling

Posted Apr 24, 2025 12:50 UTC (Thu) by make (subscriber, #62794) [Link] (3 responses)

I know that feeling, as probably every open source maintainer does. In the presence of angry users, it's difficult to stay sane.
Never forget that those loud people are a tiny minority. The huge majority of (happy) users never say a word. Even if they take your code for granted, and maybe aren't even aware your code exists (because it "just works"), that's okay, I think. That's why we build software - software that gets the job done and gets out of the way, that you don't need to be aware of. That's the best software, and people don't thank you for building it.
Just find a way to deal with those (few) angry users. I offer them a refund of the money they paid me for it (he he) and tell them to fork it if they don't like it.

I know that feeling

Posted Apr 26, 2025 19:11 UTC (Sat) by rra (subscriber, #99804) [Link] (1 responses)

> Just find a way to deal with those (few) angry users. I offer them a refund of the money they paid me for it (he he) and tell them to fork it if they don't like it.

I respect this position and I'm glad that it works for you. I don't want there to be fewer open source maintainers in the world, and I understand this reality.

But also... this is an hostile workplace. We all know this, right? You are describing work in which you are regularly verbally attacked. This isn't okay? It's a fact of life in a lot of professions, such as retail in at least the US, but at least in those professions people are generally paid to tolerate hostile customers. Not enough, usually, and those jobs can take a psychological toll, but at least one is getting food and housing out of it, hopefully.

With open source, for the median open source maintainer, this is a hobby. This is something that we are doing in our free time to scratch an itch or contribute to a community or just because it's fun, and the accepted wisdom is, well, some people are just going to be verbally hostile and abusive on a regular basis and we all have to individually find coping mechanisms to deal with this fact. This is pretty wild! It's not entirely unheard of -- I suspect that people who volunteer as museum docents or food bank workers also have to deal with hostility fairly regularly -- but I think even those types of volunteer positions are more willing to bar hostile people from the institution than we usually are in open source, and they often have a much stronger sense of mission and camaraderie with other volunteers than the often-solo open source maintenance work has.

I feel like those of us who have been in this community for a long time are boiled frogs. When I try to explain the experience of open source maintenance to people outside the community, they look at me like I'm insane and ask me why on earth I continue to participate in something like that. And honestly it's a good question.

"My hobby involves being yelled at by random strangers on the Internet" makes one sound like a masochist or a social media influencer. Maybe we should be WAY more aggressive about this kind of behavior than each of us individually finding a way to deal with it.

I have no brilliant ideas, but the one small step that I've taken is that whenever I see someone being an ass in GitHub issues, even in projects entirely unrelated to me, I proactively ban that user on GitHub so that they can no longer interact with any of my projects. I think it's going to require something like that at scale, something that throws out the Geek Social Fallacies and imposes real and significant consequences like widespread bans, to reduce the frequency of this type of hostile behavior.

I know that feeling

Posted Apr 28, 2025 12:16 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

It's not just verbal attacks when you're a Free Software maintainer.

I had a corporate actually go after my employment, because I had only taken about 50% of their patches, and I asked for changes to the rest, and I disagreed with their approach on some other stuff. So they used their contacts with higher-ups in another department to cause trouble for me.

There are some extremely, extremely, toxic, nasty and self-privileged people out there - and corporate users are sometimes the worst. Corporate developers are some of the worst - they can view maintainers as an obstacle and/or (in a weird way) a competitor.

I will never put myself in that kind of position again. If I ever manage another widely used open-source project, I will structure it so that there is some kind of consideration /both ways/ between myself and the users I interact with. I enjoyed interacting with users, who I could help. Corporate developers were a very mixed bunch, at best.

I know that feeling

Posted May 1, 2025 13:35 UTC (Thu) by lacos (guest, #70616) [Link]

> Even if they take your code for granted, and maybe aren't even aware your code exists (because it "just works"), that's okay, I think. That's why we build software - software that gets the job done and gets out of the way, that you don't need to be aware of. That's the best software, and people don't thank you for building it.

I'm completely unable to identify with this. I can do software in a hobby open source setting because it gives me a flow experience unlike anything else (= intrinsic motivation). And I can do software in a professional setting where I get *both* paid (= extrinsic motivation) *and* recognized (= a bit of intrinsic motivation), for what I do and for how I do it. What you describe is "zero motivation" (or even "negative"): "work with or on software such that the activity for you, personally, is awful, and also unnoticed / unrewarded by people who benefit from your work".

I can build software for myself (and then others need not thank for it), or I can do it for others (in which case they sure as hell need to thank for it, in one way or another).

It's not a *virtue* of "the huge majority of (happy) users" that they never say a word; there's nothing to praise about it. "Taking and taking and taking" is the most primitive activity a life form can exert, I believe; even bacteria can do it.