fuck the guy who went out of his way to badmouth me on Hacker News in particular
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This is my experience with open source. I spend most of my time and energy working on GrapheneOS. It's a massive project and I desperately need help with development. I spend a lot of my time working on public documentation and making it easier to contribute but people don't.
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Every day, I spend at least an hour defending myself and GrapheneOS from people spreading attacks on my character and the project. There are endless attacks / attempts to spread misinformation publicly and privately. I feel I need to counter it to have any hope of contributions.
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I talk about how my work on the project and how I'm being treated are severely impacting my health and no one seems to care. They'll just give uninformed advice and criticism, always expecting that the solution is that I should do even more work and take on more responsibilities.
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I've put an enormous amount of time into open source, including spending years working on it full time with zero income from it. I learned computer science and programming as part of contributing to open source. Over and over, people just take advantage of me and screw me over...
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It's not a good experience. I would probably be happier working on the projects in private without publishing them. I'm tired of being contacted with endless business proposals and offers for help that never pan out. It's one attempt after another to profit from the work I do.
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Something that bothers me is when people clearly very interested in the projects who have a lot of free time available claim they can't help because they don't know the languages/libraries or the specific codebases involved. I'm not sure how they think I ever got anything done.
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I could even buy contributors workstations and test devices with donations to improve their productivity, and I've often been in a position to get people paid for their work, but I can never find anyone that's actually going to do productive work. Can't just trust that they will.
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There's the opportunity work remotely from anywhere in the world on entirely open source software improving privacy / security for many people. I think that's compelling, even if it means getting paid 50k USD instead of 200k USD, particularly when you can live somewhere cheap.
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lmao I don't think I've ever got paid 50k USD in my life for any of my tech work, even if you count that as pre-tax
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I have no clue what I would even begin to do with 200k USD / year. The job offers from Google, etc. don't interest me since I'd rather earn 1/5 of the money doing independent open source work. There's also absolutely no way I'd consider moving, especially to the US so screw that.
I get enough income for myself from donations, but the workload is unsustainable. There would need to be an enormous amount of donations to hire security researchers / engineers with competitive salaries... Developers without that expertise would definitely help but only so much.
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I just don't understand how there can be so much interest in a project without people making substantial contributions to it. It doesn't compute for me when I've spent so much time contributing to open source projects. I still make major contributions to other projects even now.
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