I’ve been thinking about some of the ways that you can fix open source. Maybe a bit bigger than you. As your favorite arm chair developer whose only IDE is Neovim, let me tell you my proposal to improve open source work culture, introduce new avenues of communication, and why developers of free applications need to start begging people for money.

Related: The miscommunication and fumbles of the Wayland frog protocols.

The Two Way Street

The first thing is something we can start doing immediately, it’s users need to start recognizing developers. It’s something that’s really easy t o do and it’s get to know the people who make the applications that you use. It doesn’t require a lot of effort and you might learn how some of the projects or programs you use more organizationally.

Video: Hong Jen Yee’s (AKA PCMan) presentation on LXQT from Debconf 18, “LXDE & LXQt - The Classic Desktop Environments After 12 Years”

Stop Othering Developers

The thing that gets overlooked way too often is the names of developers. It’s really easy to say “_____ developer(s)” rather than the names of the people who have worked hard to contribute to the project. It’s a reminder that the blog posts you read and the issues you read about are written by people.

One of my peeves is when people talk about GNOME developers. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s a lot of problems with GNOME’s development culture, but the net of people within GNOME is too wide. Are we talking about Georges Stavracas, a big contributor to Portals, OBS, and GNOME Calendar? What about Florian Müllner, a major contributor to GNOME’s extension framework or the display manager Mutter?

It’s fine to criticize a project in healthy ways, but it’s time to stop referring to work or blog posts by “_____ developers.” With names, you’ll learn real fast that the majority of projects are run by a minority of people actually engaging with the project online or representing a project.

Just because a GitLab or GitHub shows a ton of contributors, a reminder that this is historical contributors. With a lot of individual applications, typically only a few people are actively contributing to it. If you going to criticize a decision, please only discuss it with the people whom said decision concerns.

Communications Means Contributing:

Now that I’ve ragged on users, it’s the developers’ turn. Communication with users and developers is important. Often times, it feels like when you read a lot of developer blogs, they are more focused towards the developers and they are the creators.

Let’s rag on GNOME again. GNOME runs a blog called This Week in GNOME and it’s a great way to catch up on work done by various developers within GNOME’s community. It’s also nice-looking, got great formatting, and completely uniform with the whole libadwaita feel. That’s the good, the bad is when you consider the content of the blog.

For example, from last week’s post about libadwaita updates:

libadwaita got another new widget - AdwWrapBox - similar to GtkBox, but wrapping children when they can’t fit onto the same line. This can be useful for e.g. displaying tag pills

Alice Mikhaylenko, This Week in GNOME #169 Wrapped Boxes

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the content; if anything, it’s useful to know as a (GNOME/GTK) developer. The problem is none of this is change that users would be interested in knowing. Who is the target audience of this blog? Is it developers to show off their work? Visiting the “about” page redirects you to their GitLab README, which is just a bunch of submission rules and the illusion falls apart.

Now I appreciate it because tag pills are pretty neat, but there needs to be clear means and it needs to be through an official channel. As much as I like Nate Graham’s blog and Niccolò Venerandi, it’s frankly strange that KDE developers don’t contribute “promotional” content related to their work.

Oh wait, they have YouTube and Peertube.

This is what’s really important and this is something that’s a lot more tangible to quantify—it’s time to start marrying developer and user stories. If This Week in GNOME is supposed to be the developer announcements and the prominent KDE developers are user-focused stories, there needs to be a clear cut explanation of how the developer changes positively impact the user experience.

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It shouldn’t be surprising that the users of a free operating system overpower its developers. It’s a tough job, but it probably makes a great story. It just needs to be these organizations telling these stories and putting this content in front of new users, not insiders.

Devs Need To Be YouTubers

Here’s the tough part: asking for money. We can’t just tell empty stories, because there needs to be a call to action. Of course, a story can be used to get more coding work or developers involved, but there needs to be a way in for the people who don’t know how or never worked in it professionally.

Here’s the thing, it’s also a great moment to make developer talks higher quality and more forward facing. Every year, you get great conferences from places like FOSDEM or All Systems Go!

Distantly related: Lennart Pottering’s talk on systemd and TPM

Here’s a great idea, organize some of the developers to do a Jitsi call (we don’t do Zoom around here, they are frauds). You’re going to sit down, livestream every other week, maybe every week. It doesn’t even have to be that long, even just 20 minutes. You chat about the cool new things happening in your project and answer questions in chat. You can be open about it, tell jokes, it’ll be a great time!

All of this might sound weird, but the way you get publicity especially in the eyes of normal people, is to act like a content creator. You can’t just a dev, you also need to be cognizant of your social media presence and speak with the authority of a YouTuber. It gets attention, but more importantly, exposes you to what people think and can draw people to your project by engaging with them,

Great example (though it goes into the unofficial side), Alecaddd’s videos on developing for Mozilla Thunderbird, including Thunderbird’s journey to get rid of technical debt and modernize the code.

FOSS Should Become Donationware

All of this would also help solve the chicken and egg problem of how to fund developers or foundations. You now have work that people know you for and you have a way to engage with said people, therefore, you’ve achieved the peak goal of any content creator: begging for money.

At any moment, open source projects need to start begging their users for money. Of course, you can’t make it too annoying, but you have to guilt trip them. Don’t think of like microtransactions in a mobile game! Think of it more like the banner that appears at the top of the Wayback Machine or Wikipedia.

And that’s the real rub here. Developing software for free, distributing it to people for free, and reproducing it for free is not sustainable. It should be something like a monthly reminder telling you donate. Now I’m not saying there should be a way to toggle it on or off since this is open source software and you should be allowed to do what you want to it.

The content creator angle also helps because it directs people to support the people who make a project that they enjoy a lot. it’s also finding a good way to distribute money to people who do specific work and a reminder to people who build the tools people use every day.

This is not a definitive way to raise money or improve publicity, because there’s always something that needs to be changed, but take this as some suggestions to how we can change the way we, as users, see developers as people who create things. There’s a reason open source is deprived of talent and has no financial model and a good way to change it how developers advertise their products to the public, which in turn generates developmental and financial contribution.

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