Comment by tvbusy
17 days ago
You're thinking of open source projects that only need a few hours of work per week. Anything more than a few hours a week either requires someone to give up their full time job to work on it (switch to part time jobs/consultation is an option), or having multiple contributors which still require significant effort to coordinate at the end of the day.
Let's say Tailwind CSS gives up and stops the project, do you think there'll be someone else picking it up, knowing how Tailwind failed in the first place? LLMs don't create new things, they remix what are already available. It's delusional to think that you should use LLMs to create a whole UI library just for your application and spend enormous effort not only maintaining it but also train new team members to use it down the road.
Open source is charity, it's unreasonable, even entitled, to demand someone work on it full time without pay.
In my experience, people are willing to contribute up to 10 hours/week to individual volunteer projects they care about. That may increase to up to 20 hours/week for a year or two when they assume a key role.
A full-time job takes a third of your waking hours. Then you probably need to spend another third on various maintenance activities, leaving you with the equivalent of a full-time job to spend as you see fit.
Of course, when you have a volunteer-run project, your priorities will be different from projects that people do for a living. You will probably focus on what the contributors find interesting or important, rather than what someone else might find useful or valuable.
Open source is charity, it's unreasonable, even entitled, to demand someone work on it full time without pay
Of course, but equally it's also unreasonable and entitled to assume that if you work on it full time (or any time at all) that that work deserves or will receive a fair (or any) financial return. That's not what open source is about, and the featured post seems to miss that.