Solo open source maintainers face burnout and security challenges, with 60% unpaid and 60% considering quitting.

  • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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    20 hours ago

    How many FOSS projects actually benefit “millions and billions of people”? That kind of impact feels like it’s few and far between.

    Linux or any of the different projects and components that support it and it’s development, including all the dev tooling like git, languages, etc. etc. Basically any work on Firefox and web browsers, any work on Wikipedia or it’s supporting infrastructure, work on stuff like Lemmy and the fediverse likely will in the long run, torrents and the like, open source game engines, IDEs, Blender, Home Assistant etc. etc. etc.

    There are a lot of open source projects that have a lot of rippling ramifications, and there is inherent benefit in having more open source software developed independently. If Firefox was a better funded and more competent alternative to Chrome we wouldn’t even have this whole Manifest v3 mess since Chrome would just lose all their users.

    • Kissaki@programming.dev
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      1 hour ago

      If Firefox was a better funded and more competent alternative to Chrome we wouldn’t even have this whole Manifest v3 mess since Chrome would just lose all their users.

      I don’t think that’s an issue of competency - which I understand as functionality/feature parity in this wording.

      Chrome gained and became this popular likely entirely due to Marketing and big-corp ecosystem network effect through pushing it - through Google, Google Docs, and related Alphabet services.

      I don’t think Firefox was every really inferior. I’ve always preferred the dev tools and a few other things over Chrome. There was merely a time where performance was worse, but that likely only mattered in benchmarks - and marketing.