Tootfinder

I've been talking before why money won't solve the burnout problem. But let's for a minute assume that you really wanted to help people maintaining #FreeSoftware by paying them. The problem is that:
1. You have to pay them a living wage.
While all monetary help is appreciated by developers, they need a living wage. Not "that should prevent you from starving to death" but the kind of money that can support a honest (but not lavish) lifestyle: pay the bills, feed your family, cover other living costs such as repairs, clothes, appliances, and let you save enough for future emergencies.
It's simple as that. If you can't do that, they're going to need a dayjob. If they're lucky, it won't collide with their #FLOSS work. If they're not, it will kill them. Or they'll fall somewhere in the middle, slowly burning out until they can neither maintain their projects, nor work.
2. You need to guarantee that the payouts will continue.
People need security. They're not going to stay unemployed, let alone quit their job or turn down a job offer, unless they either have good guaranties or substantial savings (or they're in a really bad shape and wouldn't be able to handle the job anyway). The job market is hell, and people just know that when the payments stop, they may not be able to find a job soon, let alone a good job. Even "passively" looking for a job can burn you out.
So yeah, one-off payments and pinky swears won't do. And it isn't even a matter of whether we can trust you; it's a matter if you'll actually be able to continue paying us. And honestly, I don't really know how to solve that. Perhaps by paying up front, but for how long? Finding a job may take more than a year, finding a good job may be once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
3. It can't end up being a job.
Perhaps most difficult of all, these payments can't really come with explicit obligations. I mean, that's the whole point: you want to support FLOSS, not turn it into a corporate project. You want the maintainer to remain free and enjoy the work. That is unlikely to happen if their livelihood is now dependent on your satisfaction. And even if it isn't, I for example would still feel indebted to whoever's paying me to do FLOSS, even if they really didn't expect anything in return, and would fall into a spiral of guilt-inflicted burnout if I failed to maintain the software satisfactorily.
#OpenSource

I couldn't care less about a bunch of rich people in Brooklyn, I just read the article for the delicious drama. However, about halfway through the article, I started to see so many #FreeSoftware parallels.
1) Volunteers spend countless unpaid hours creating/maintaining something to better their community.
2) For-profit business packages it up as part of their offering.

Thank you very much to all the #freesoftware projects that allowed me to do, what I do now.
Thank you for educating me, giving me tools to work with, giving me the opportunity to give back, to feel validated, thank you.
#opensource

Running independent websites is like planting flowers in front of your plot, on the public lane that the municipality doesn't care about.
You have to deal with people trampling over them because the pavement is not wide enough for their groups. The junk flying over from the nearby supermarket. Asshole neighbor throwing empty alcohol bottles out. Dog shit. And if you succeed nevertheless, people will just come over and dig it all out, to take into their own gardens.
And then some bright libertarian will come and tell you that you should be grateful and praise their ingenuity.
#FreeSoftware #www

The hardest lesson for morally-minded people to learn is that the vast majority of people are not morally-minded.
#FreeSoftware #AI #LLM #Ethics

Parsing pdf forms used to be easy, but with the new form-standard and people altering forms by backspacing labels only, filled in forms can be a complete mess. The preferred way now is to convert to a picture with pdftoppm, then OCR it with tesseract. The result is flawless! #freesoftware

It's so scary and painful to watch the speed and enthusiasm with which the bastion of software freedom that we built the past 40 years is being ripped apart by rust-infatuated drones doing Big Tech's biddings. Remove Copyleft protection at all cost so that we can steal all your work for our proprietary evils.
"So this is how liberty dies...with thunderous applause" -- Padmé Amidala
#FreeSoftware

Kinda related to #Gentoo, so cool" or "they stopped using it, so sad". And I'm like, "why should we care?"
Do they donate money to Gentoo? They don't. And if they did, it would probably come with obligations making this not worth it.
Do they contribute back? Rarely, and if they do, they are unreliable. They benefit more than we do. They just want to dump the packages they need, quickly duct taped together, so that we would maintain them going forward. Their employees rarely reveal that they're paid to do this, and if they do, it's not so they'd be held to higher standards, but to emphasize their importance: "you must placate us."
Well, sometimes they hire Gentoo developers. It's nice that these developers get some gratification for their work, especially if they're able to continue contributing on work time. But in the end, company priorities win. We are either left with loads of new packages with no maintainer and unclear significance, or a Google employee who appeared every once in a while to dump a bunch of ChromeOS patches and never bothered handling the fallout.
So, sorry, but I'd rather care for volunteers who want to make Gentoo better, than companies who see some profit incentive in it.
PS. I'm probably focusing too much on the negative aspects, and we likely had some positive interactions that are far less known and usually don't meet with such fanfare.
#FreeSoftware

Slowly, but without pause, our #FLOSS slicer for resin #3dPrinting is starting to take shape :) .
#OpenResinAlliance ( #Resin3dPrinting #OpenSource #FreeSoftware

Tech companies seem to be running a cycle:
1. They don't realize how much they're relying on volunteer-maintained projects.
2. Something bad happens and they suddenly decide they need to support this critical infrastructure, often by hiring some people behind it and making its maintenance part of their dayjob.
3. They realize they could save money by exploiting volunteers to maintain these #OpenSource projects. They lay workers off or move them to other projects.
4. Go to 1.
Except now they're trying to replace workers with slop machines, deskill everyone and basically they're not only poisoning the well, but killing the whole water cycle. And they're realizing that they just gave the bad people a tool that can quickly find just how vulnerable their critical infrastructure is.
Really appreciate the long-term thinking there.
#FreeSoftware #FLOSS #TechBros #AI #LLM #NoAI #NoLLM #Linux #security

There's a new piece explaining "The Slow Collapse of #MkDocs": "How personality clashes, an absent founder, and a controversial redesign fractured one of Python's most popular projects."
#httpx?
Well, turns out no, not at all. It looks like encode has already crumbled and became immensely toxic.
httpx is not allowing bug reports anymore, apparently because of "absurdly skewed gender representation", whatever that means.
#OpenSource.
#FreeSoftware #Python