Sustainable OSS (Balkan Ruby 2024, Sofia)

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Bozhidar Batsov (@bbatsov) / Balkan Ruby 2024 Sustainable Open-Source Development An Antidote to the Madness

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Yo, everyone!

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Long time, no see!

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First time at a conference in Bulgaria since 2019!

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A lot has happened since then…

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Ruby 3

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Man City fi nally won the Champions League

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Messi fi nally won the World Cup

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Napoli fi nally won Serie A

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Grigor Dimitrov made it back to the Top 10

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Bozhidar (Божидар)

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@bbatsov

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Twitter -> X

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@batsov.net

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@bbatsov.hachyderm.io

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✅ Older

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❌ Wiser

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Seiko 6105 (a.k.a. Captain Willard)

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Casio

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Citizen

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FOSS

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bbatsov

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Ruby & Rails style guides

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RuboCop supports Prism now! (In other words - RuboCop is faster)

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RuboCop turned 12 on April 21!

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Total Downloads: 411,962,118

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#68

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Clojure Interactive Development Environment that Rocks

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•Emacs Prelude •Projectile •Flycheck •Crux •Super-save •adoc-mode

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Sustainable OSS Development

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Wasn’t OSS supposed to be fun?

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Two types of OSS projects

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Enterprise OSS

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• Eclipse • VS Code • MySQL • PostgreSQL • Firefox

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Hobby (Hacker) OSS

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HOSS

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True OSS

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TOSS

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Kool OSS

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KOSS

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• 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

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Responsibilities!

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Hint: It’s not just writing code

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• 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

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Remember rubydramas.com?

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OSS Dramas are a major source of burnout

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So, how do we make this OSS thing sustainable?

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• GitHub Sponsors • Patreon • OpenCollective • Tidelift • thanks.dev • PayPal

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Donations!

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Donations are not a viable business model!

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Tipping is a (more) viable business model!

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Impact of the economic recession on donations

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Donations trend 2022-2024

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-30-50% (Depending on the project & platform)

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What else can we do?

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Focused crowd-funding campaigns (e.g. on Kickstarter)

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Community foundations (e.g. Rubyists Together & Clojurists Together)

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Dual-licensing

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Charging for features/support

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• Sidekiq • Phusion Passenger • …

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The OSS community is brutal

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Often projects/ maintainers are attacked when they try to monetise their work

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Keep calm and don't give a f*ck about the haters

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Getting hired by a major user of your project(s)?

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Or maybe something more radical that doesn’t involve money?

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Learn to say “No!”

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Keep it simple

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Keep the magic alive

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Decrease the bus factor

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xz fiasco

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OSS is sustainable when it's fun and/or funded

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Open-source is not about you https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba9519972d9

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.