Privileged, but not a clown

Published by Lars Kappert on June 28, 2024

This is a story in 3 parts about OSS and me: how it started, how we got here, and how it’s going.

Soon after the first “View Source” in Internet Explorer 5.0 and copy-pasting a snippet from a <SCRIPT> tag into some text editor I’ve started using free and open source software. PHP, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, JSLint, Prototype, jQuery and Lodash come to mind. Using and understanding this free software taught me a lot about programming, and allowed me to start a career as a developer.

Enthusiasm

Remember Apache Ant, Closure Compiler or YUI Compiler? I’ve used this to bundle and minify CSS, JS and HTML, using XML! Named it Jaguarundi 13 years ago, and now I’m sitting here realizing I’ve always had this relentless enthusiasm for developer tooling.

Movement

Around 2009, projects like jQuery and Lodash got me into both freelancing and open source. I remember working for Backbase at the time, but also looking at this OSS movement. I wanted to use it, be part of it, build cool things with it! Alongside heroes like John Resig (jQuery) and John-David Dalton (Lodash), many developers in the OSS community were doing their part. Some genius work got pushed and it was all available right there in the open! I’ve always enjoyed solving problems with code, and more and more browser APIs and libraries became available to do just that.

Being a freelance frontend developer getting to use the latest & greatest OSS in my work. This was (and still is!) great, nothing to complain.

Open

I love coding, I love sharing. I’m coding in the open since 2010. As a self-taught developer I’ve learned a ton from reading other people’s source code. From pushing code and receiving honest feedback about it. I still like to think some of it has once been helpful or inspirational to someone in one way or another.

Act of kindness

There’s a little story I’d like to share here. Kerim Satirli, an early adopter of release-it, reached out to me about 6 years ago. He wanted to send me a gift as an appreciation of my work, and sent me two delicious bottles of beer! I’ll never forget this wonderful act of kindness. I mean, sending swag and all is cool, but this hit different. Sometimes we almost forget there are actually human beings on both ends. Thanks, Kerim!

Win

And just this morning, Jonas Felix reminds me of his feature request for reveal-md earlier this year. Support for Mermaid diagrams in Reveal.js slides is useful to other users of reveal-md as well, and they’ve sponsored my work on this. A win for everyone, thanks Jonas!

Privilege

Pushing code. Honestly, I didn’t mean to earn anything with any of this. My projects aren’t extraordinary, I’m a developer in a safe and rich country, and so many other developers deserve at least the same. Being involved in OSS is simply a great way to keep learning and stay hirable with an open profile, which is an invaluable privilege in itself.

Part 2. How we got here

Return the favor

Let’s imagine for a moment you’re a developer working in a commercial setting. You’re adding a valuable open-source package to package.json. The pull request gets merged, and you or someone else on the team returns the favor to the creator of the dependency on behalf of the company. Sounds fair enough, right?

In contrast with more traditional, commercial software, this transaction usually doesn’t happen, while no-one is accountable. Businesses love permissive licenses, this is why open-source became so popular in the first place. No matter how you look at it, exploitation it is. Feels like an odd thing to say, knowing eventually there’s always humans on both ends. That’s why we need to normalize companies paying for OSS.

Does your company have a budget for FOSS?

Yes, that’s “budget” and “FOSS” in the same sentence. If the software is of value in a commercial setting and creators or maintainers indicate support is welcome, then by all means, please provide it if you can.

Like myself, many of you probably prefer support from companies over that from fellow developers. Because the latter is mostly a redistribution of hard-earned income (let alone tax-over-tax deductions).

Sustainable

There’s something sadly ironic about developers trying to get hired elsewhere, just to sustain their work on OSS. If we talk about sustainable open source, this isn’t it. Some of those brilliant minds are potentially much more effective and happy when working on their own projects used by many others, compared to being an IC for a single company.

Initiatives

Lots of awesome people and companies are improving the situation around open-source funding. By financially supporting people and projects, hiring developers to let them work on (their own) open source, and initiatives like OpenCollective, Tidelift, Polar, Tea, and so on. I’m glad to see the needle is moving.

Incentives

Some metrics in use by such initiatives are based on the number of downloads or the number of dependencies. SMART perhaps, but such metrics can be abused and don’t necessarily represent the actual value of a project. Sometimes popular projects become even counter-productive to the OSS community as a whole. We need different incentives to better distribute funds.

Bills

The number of dependent projects, GitHub stars, npm downloads, contributors and so on are useful metrics. They’re good to get a sense of usage and popularity. Grateful people publicly and privately praising your work and contributing to your work is important and a great motivation overall. These types of input might often be fulfilling for quite some time. But eventually, the harsh reality is that none of this pays the bills.

AS-IS

Now let’s imagine for a moment you’re a developer and excited your work is on GitHub. It’s open, it’s visible, and it seems useful to others. The moment other people start using your work an interesting dynamic starts to happen. Feedback, bug reports and feature requests begin to trickle in. Open-source licenses come with an “AS-IS” clause and no SLAs, so remember: you don’t owe anything to anyone. Yet chances are you feel a sense of connection and responsibility.

Trust

In fact, trust is essential to OSS and most developers tend to build a lot of trust working in the open. In many ways: by being responsive to questions and feedback, by adding automated test suites, by not breaking things unexpectedly, and so on. This requires time and energy. And some of of that feedback might be ungrateful and negative, consuming even more energy.

Space

Dealing with negativity is another interesting dynamic. How do you handle it? Sometimes you feel the urge to address negative feedback immediately and get over with it. Other times, you should get a good night’s rest first and avoid responding in a way you might regret. I try to remind myself such decisions are made in the space between stimulus and response, and understanding I’m in control here makes all the difference.

Dealing positively even with the most unconstructive negative feedback is a superpower. It’s just another data point highlighting a potential weakness in the project. Why return negativity immediately, if you can find the space for a positive response instead?

You are not your code

As a developer, I think this is one of the best principles to live by. Bad code will get better. The more important question is: does it solve a real problem? If it’s useful to you, then that’s great already. If it’s your ambition to reach more people and if it solves a problem they’re having, then that’s fantastic. You put in the work and hopefully you’ll reap the rewards.

Only you get to decide what the rewards actually mean to you

Stories

Rewards can come in many shapes or forms. But whatever constitutes low rewards to you is what fuels burnout. Here are some recent stories I’ve read about burnout and exploitation in the OSS community:

Unfortunately this is just a tiny tip of the iceberg. I’m grateful Artem, Anthony, David and Michael shared their stories. So many projects that their creator poured their energy in, but for one reason or another didn’t get the recognition they deserved or the support they needed.

Part 3. How it’s going

To be honest, I’m not even sure what I’m getting at with all of this. Is it idealism? Ignorance? Profit-impaired? I’m still not sure what to call it. Whatever it is, my vision on things slowly started to change. I feel like I can and want to contribute and share in a more sustainable way than I’m used to, and I guess that’s what I’m trying to figure out these days.

Stability

My most-downloaded project is Release It! Over a decade old and tons of cool projects use it daily to publish their packages. There are plenty of alternatives, but apparently its stability and feature set is still appreciated by plenty of people. So I’ll happily keep maintaining it, it’s not going anywhere.

Knip

The thing you might know I can hardly contain my excitement about these days is Knip. I love working on Knip, because it solves a real problem I have in projects myself. Finding dead code and unused dependencies in an automated fashion is an invaluable tool in my belt. Another reason I enjoy working on it is that it’s a right-sized project for me with still many elements I can learn from and improve. This can’t possibly go without saying Knip has really great contributors and I’m receiving financial support from wonderful backers.

Reward

The greatest reward I can get is fellow developers sharing they got rid of dead code in their codebase, and how they’ve added Knip to their CI workflow. I will never get enough of those little red blocks on GitHub for deleted code (specially when done using Knip). It’s that relentless enthusiasm over developer tooling, I guess!

Cycle

At some point Knip will have a successor, or become obsolete. That’s the cycle, and that’s how it should be. Until then, my goal is to keep raising the bar and just keep doing my part.

Trying

Principles to live by and stories about burnout in the OSS community are important to share and have taught me a lot.

I try to only pour in the amount of energy I can afford to lose

Fortunate enough to not have experienced a burnout myself, I feel like this is going well. I won’t let anyone trick, threat or nerd-snipe me into anything more. Unless it’s a critical issue, that fix can usually wait.

There are days I couldn’t care less about silly edge cases. Other days, bugfixes arrive in your node_modules faster than you can say “Node.js is actually pretty damn good”.

Clown

As with so many things, there’s a tipping point where the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and sometimes I can’t help but feel like a clown.

Since I believe the value of my contributions to OSS is too far off from what I’m receiving in monthly sponsorships, I’ll sure be looking for more funding in one way or another. Or rethink what the heck I’m doing here.

Care

Coding is great, the OSS community is great. I can’t imagine not sharing and learning, and I want to keep doing my part. Rest assured I’ll be taking care of myself along the way. Writing this article was a great step!