 Today we're going to talk about stories stories from maintainers of free and open source projects who either by volunteering or by not being paid enough most of the times put out the work to maintain stuff that they give out for free basically for both individual users and companies. And we're going to talk about some stories that I've heard recently that say how this model that we have currently is just not sustainable and it's not working. So the first one which you probably saw and if you didn't go read it immediately because it's heartbreaking it's about CoreJS. So I'm just gonna very quickly do a summary and then give some thoughts about it. CoreJS is a polyfill library of JavaScript and it's used by roughly 75% of the 100 most visited websites. So it's a pretty big library. If I understood this correctly which I probably didn't they provide and by the I mean this person working on it provides the very implementations for the very latest ACMA script standards and proposals. I am very much not in the JavaScript world and yeah this entire library which is used again by the most used website is just maintained by a single person who recently burned out rightfully so. XKCD picture where the entire internet is you know kept alive by a single library developed by a single person who hasn't enough funding that's exactly the case here. Now the person working on this library never quite advertised himself or the project he just published the project on github and that was enough for him and he never quite searched for big monetary compensation for what he was doing. In fact he even moved back to Russia because apparently it's cheaper to live there so that was easier for him. However something happened. Do you know about the bus factor because this is extremely important here. The bus factor is how many people should be hit by a bus for a project to die. In this case the bus factor is one for this channel in fact the bus factor is one if I if a bus hit me that's it no more Nikolo but in theory the internet and the super important projects the internet relies on should not have a bus factor of one and what happened here is exactly that there was a bus factor one and something went wrong. In this particular case it's not this person getting hit by a bus but it's this person hitting somebody. Yeah let me read it directly. On an April night he was driving home two deadly drunk 18 years old girls in dark clothes decided somehow to crawl across a poorly lit highway one of them laid down in the road another one sat down and dragged her first directly under my wheels. Suddenly one of them died and the other went to the hospital and according to him is innocent like he couldn't have prevented it according to witnesses the same but not according to the jury so he had to either go to prison or repay a bunch of money to the family and he didn't have the money. What he tried to do to avoid that is do a fundraising to actually cover the expense of the legal expenses. So what he decided to do is to add every time you installed CoreJS a little console message that says hello I'm searching for funds or a job you can donate to me here and you can contact me. Did that work? Not at all obviously his revenue stream as we'll see later didn't increase significantly however what happened is that people started started absolutely hating on him absolutely hating. As an example I quote get rid of that idiot and this CoreJS library which is I don't know what to say and of course not only he didn't receive much donations but all the big companies using his project didn't give him a cent literally so he went to prison. He stayed there for around a year and then managed to come back and start resumed work on the library again with even less rent than you compared to before. So at the very beginning he was earning around two thousand five hundred dollars a month this was at the start then that decreased to one thousand seven hundred and then something happened which was one of the main platforms to receive donations for him just stopped giving him money and you know you can kind of guess the reason politics Russia. I told you he lives in Russia something was going to go wrong so all the donations that he had raised for that month and any following month they didn't arrive to him nothing which cut his pay from one thousand eight hundred to just eight hundred. To be clear he still receives donations through Tidelift but it's just that Tidelift doesn't give those that money to him and by the way Tidelift does use CoreJS the irony. At this point of the article he just puts out a big paragraph which starts with a big lettering no more which is exactly what you would expect. What he says is he either receives more money through donations or he's is going to stop making CoreJS publicly available and is gonna start to charge for it or he's just gonna stop working on the project which would be extra sad and he says that especially because now he actually has like a children and he has to you know support his family which is fully understandable and something that's also mentioned in the other article I want to talk about which is called what it feels to be like an open source maintainer which I've already talked about but I think it's very important to raise again and in this case I think this person is purely talking from a volunteer point of view he has a job and as a volunteer he also maintains various open source projects and he talks about how it's one of the things that makes takes away happiness from him which is sad and you know it feels like again you should read the article because I wouldn't be able to convey how well written it is but what it feels like it's that it's he's extremely overworked and being a developer in open source and this is completely different from proprietary software being a developer in open source means that you have to deal with the people using your software directly you're doing something that's interact connection with the community one very important thing to say about this article is firstly there is a constant stream of new issues new questions and new stuff and it's very hard to stay on top of all of them and when you're like looking ahead he says I've already told my partner that if and when we decide to start having kids I will probably quit open source for good which is not something you want to hear from somebody who's maintaining open source projects that many people probably rely on this is not something that's working currently another example which is directly from kitty is an article from yesterday actually and it's called false communities you don't have to yell so what happened this is from a kitty contributor that recently implemented outlines for windows which is something that we kd designers wanted to implement and those outlines were also implemented to plasma dialogues by me actually and what happened is that when people tried out these outlines they asked for there to be an option to be customized to be removed which to be clear fair enough it is something that we are considering we're trying to wait whether it makes sense to have that option which will of course add more code burden and maintenance burden or if you know it's important enough so it's something that we are currently thinking of that is fine what is not fine is that often enough these comments are toxic they have a blog and in the comments of the blog there are people going there even though that is not the right place to do this and they start saying oh the outlines are ugly or kitty is becoming like you know which is all very toxic behavior and people even went to the merge request which is not where you should put feedback that is the merge request feedback goes into backs dot kitty dot org and started complaining about this there and you might say just a few comments yes but for the maintainer that did this in their free time and now he's receiving like dozens of comments about this like every day it's demotivating to to say the least and i've already seen in the past where a kitty volunteered implemented something he received some nasty comments about it and said you know what why should i do this let's stop working for kitty like why should i put my free time into doing something if what i received back are insults so they stopped working and how can you blame them really there is in fact an entire research about this which is called routes and bridges 143 pages long which talks exactly about this open up your phone your social media your news your medical records your bank they are all using free and public code sometimes this free and public code is made by one single person that maintains direct of it sometimes they're not paid at all to do that sometimes they're not paid enough and most of the time they're completely overworked they're doing too much for them and sometimes it's demotivating and it brings happiness out of them which is not how it's supposed to work at all so a couple of things first of all people please please try to be extremely respectful towards those people who are putting out their free time into this it's horrifying the amount of comments i see around on reddit and such that are like super annoying of course it has happened to me as well like receiving some comments nasty about my floating planets and such i don't care but you know don't i would be honestly happier if you didn't so but this is not like an actual solution this is like the minimum and then we have to actually we have to actually start addressing the real issue which is making sure that we're able to sustain all the one person projects first maintainers out there even from a monetary point of view somehow especially when big companies are using their projects without giving back anything what what should we do i don't know any ideas