Money Isn't Going to Solve the Burnout Problem
Thought this was really insightful and think more people should read this
https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2026/03/07/money-isnt-going-to-solve-the-burnout-problem/Open linkView original on lemmy.dbzer0.com
5 replies
Respectfully and meant humorously, WTF are you talking about then.
Yes money can solve it. It can solve FOSS devs needing a day job, it can solve not having enough people to do deal with FOSS related nonsense.
I'm really annoyed when people say that and somehow have "shame" when it comes to demanding, let's say, $50 million from FANG to maintain their project. Just ask. And then because of that shame, they think "asking for money" is asking a few fellow FOSS enjoyers for $1-5 a month and then that amounts to like $3.50 and then yeah of course that won't solve any problems.
Michał addresses his problems with relying on donations later on in the post. Dayjobs are the main source of burnout but devs need it to survive. It's very difficult for a FOSS project to get enough consistent funding to pay a liveable wage for even one dev without compromising on some aspects to gain funding. And even if they do, the FOSS work now becomes the dayjob and becomes a source of burnout. Ontop of this, donations are extremely unstable and there's no guarantee a project will be able to pay a dev enough every year.
My thoughts exactly
Yeah, I can understand the frustration when an external decision forces you to disappoint some of your users, but ultimately you have to pick your battles. When neither the Python nor Rust ecosystem thinks those platforms are worth supporting, it's probably not either worth it for you to worry...
In a side node: when building for geentoo it should be possible to build all rust libs as dylib. The compiler only offers a stable abi for the same version and all flags being equal. When building everything yourself that should work at the coat of updating the compiler requiring a complete rebuild of all libs.