Sustainable OSS (Balkan Ruby 2024, Sofia)

Slide deck from my Balkan Ruby 2024 talk.

Transcript

1. slide unintentionally left blank
2. Bozhidar Batsov (@bbatsov) / Balkan Ruby 2024 Sustainable Open-Source Development An Antidote to the Madness
3. Yo, everyone!
4. Long time, no see!
5. First time at a conference in Bulgaria since 2019!
7. A lot has happened since then…
8. Ruby 3
9. Man City fi nally won the Champions League
10. Messi fi nally won the World Cup
11. Napoli fi nally won Serie A
12. Grigor Dimitrov made it back to the Top 10
15. Bozhidar (Божидар)
16. @bbatsov
17. Twitter -> X
18. @batsov.net
19. @bbatsov.hachyderm.io
20. ✅ Older
21. ❌ Wiser
32. Seiko 6105 (a.k.a. Captain Willard)
35. Casio
36. Citizen
39. FOSS
40. bbatsov
41. Ruby & Rails style guides
43. RuboCop supports Prism now! (In other words - RuboCop is faster)
44. RuboCop turned 12 on April 21!
45. Total Downloads: 411,962,118
46. #68
48. Clojure Interactive Development Environment that Rocks
50. •Emacs Prelude •Projectile •Flycheck •Crux •Super-save •adoc-mode
51. Sustainable OSS Development
52. Wasn’t OSS supposed to be fun?
53. Two types of OSS projects
54. Enterprise OSS
55. • Eclipse • VS Code • MySQL • PostgreSQL • Firefox
57. Hobby (Hacker) OSS
58. HOSS
59. True OSS
60. TOSS
61. Kool OSS
62. KOSS
64. • You try to solve a problem that you’re passionate about • You don’t have any plans for world domination • Others fi nd your solution useful and they pick it up • You achieve “world fame” • You have to do work that you never envisioned or wanted to do • Your hobby project becomes similar to your usual work… • … sans the pay
65. Responsibilities!
66. Hint: It’s not just writing code
67. • Writing & reviewing code • Writing & reviewing documentation • Product management • Providing users with support • Building a community around the project • Marketing • Dev relations • Dealing with unhappy users and random attacks
68. Remember rubydramas.com?
69. OSS Dramas are a major source of burnout
70. So, how do we make this OSS thing sustainable?
71. • GitHub Sponsors • Patreon • OpenCollective • Tidelift • thanks.dev • PayPal
72. Donations!
73. Donations are not a viable business model!
74. Tipping is a (more) viable business model!
75. Impact of the economic recession on donations
76. Donations trend 2022-2024
77. -30-50% (Depending on the project & platform)
79. What else can we do?
80. Focused crowd-funding campaigns (e.g. on Kickstarter)
81. Community foundations (e.g. Rubyists Together & Clojurists Together)
82. Dual-licensing
83. Charging for features/support
85. • Sidekiq • Phusion Passenger • …
86. The OSS community is brutal
87. Often projects/ maintainers are attacked when they try to monetise their work
88. Keep calm and don't give a f*ck about the haters
89. Getting hired by a major user of your project(s)?
90. Or maybe something more radical that doesn’t involve money?
91. Learn to say “No!”
93. Keep it simple
94. Keep the magic alive
95. Decrease the bus factor
96. xz fiasco
97. OSS is sustainable when it's fun and/or funded
98. Open-source is not about you https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba9519972d9
99. The only people entitled to say how open source 'ought' to work are people who run projects, and the scope of their entitlement extends only to their own projects.
100. Just because someone open sources something does not imply they owe the world a change in their status, focus and effort, e.g. from inventor to community manager.
101. As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation.
102. Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period. It means you get the source for software and the right to use and modify it. All social impositions associated with it, including the idea of 'community- driven-development' are part of a recently-invented mythology with little basis in how things actually work, a mythology that embodies, cult-like, both a lack of support for diversity in the ways things can work and a pervasive sense of communal entitlement.
103. Deep & Profound!
104. The End