Feeling the burn: When open source developers decide to take a break
- Reference: 1771844414
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/02/23/open_source_devs_column/
- Source link:
That's why a recent Bluesky discussion thread caught my eye. The npmx team, who are working on a registry browser for the Node Package Manager (NPM), Node.js's default package manager, announced they were [1]taking a week off to recharge .
Linus Torvalds and friends tell The Reg how Linux solo act became a global jam session [2]READ MORE
Then, if you can believe it, Anthony Fu, an open source developer and maintainer, had the nerve to say: "OSS [open source software] is a long-playing game, if not forever. But we are people behind those projects, and [3]we need good rest and balance to keep things sustainable . I am super happy to see this move and looking forward to seeing how it could change how OSS works for all of us." Fu, actually, suggests that "more OSS projects should DO THIS."
Vacation! What next? The 12-hour workday? Weekends off!? Who do these people think they are?!
You see, workaholism in open source isn't a personal quirk of a few over‑committed hackers. It's a structural pattern baked into how modern OSS is funded, consumed, and celebrated.
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It's been that way since the start. Eric S. Raymond, an early open source leader, explained in his 1998 essay " [5]Homesteading the Noosphere " that this developed because open source hackers are a gift culture. "Within it, there is no serious shortage of the 'survival necessities' – disk space, network bandwidth, computing power. Software is freely shared. This abundance creates a situation in which the only available measure of competitive success is peer reputation."
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That's a very powerful motive. Now combine this with what Raymond described in [8]The Cathedral and the Bazaar , the New Testament of open source, where hackers code for fun, curiosity, and the satisfaction of solving hard problems. This is a form of play and artistic expression, so developers stay up late on projects because they find it deeply enjoyable and meaningful, not because they're paid by the hour.
Together, this is a perfect recipe for workaholism. As the years have gone by, though, other elements have come in to muddy the waters.
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For example, open source maintainers still usually start as enthusiastic volunteers. But as projects become widely adopted, expectations scale faster than formal support. Popular maintainers describe "working tirelessly behind the scenes" to keep projects secure and responsive, often with little or no pay. This passion becomes work in every meaningful and unpleasant sense. You know the drill: deadlines, incident response, and stakeholder pressure. But in open source projects, you seldom have the boundaries, compensation, or institutional buffers that exist in a normal job.
That gap encourages workaholic patterns: always‑on responsiveness, treating evenings and weekends as default working time, and feeling personally responsible for every bug and user request. Because much OSS work is framed as a "labor of love," maintainers may normalize extreme hours as dedication rather than overwork, even when it clearly is workaholism.
On top of that, [10]many maintainers report they're underpaid or, all too often, not paid at all, despite the enormous downstream value they create. That often means holding a day job and then maintaining critical infrastructure at night. All of which leads to 60-80 hour weeks.
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Besides coding – the one part that open source developers love or they'd never get started – as a project picks up steam, they find themselves swamped with issues, pull requests, and emails. Adding salt to the wound, this maintenance work is invisible. So they end up working ever harder on the least rewarding part of their projects.
Nonetheless, maintainers often feel a strong moral responsibility toward their users and fellow developers. They often feel guilty when they cannot respond quickly. They often feel the weight of their software world on their shoulders.
Finally, in good companies, customer support and management buffer engineers from the worst user interactions. In open source, there's no one between you and critics, entitled users, and customers who think nothing of making unreasonable demands. This has led, in one notable case, to the video conversion coders of [12]FFmpeg telling Google to either fund them or stop sending them CVE-sloppy bugs .
[13]The graying open source community needs fresh blood
[14]Rust Foundation tries to stop maintainers corroding
[15]Asahi Linux loses another prominent dev as GPU guru calls it quits
[16]Open source maintainers are really feeling the squeeze
The result is that [17]even the most devoted developers can burn out . Take, for instance, [18]Kubernetes Ingress NGINX . This Kubernetes project was retired recently, not because people weren't using it. Far from it! It was as popular as ever. But there was no one left to maintain it. It has become "work," and with no one willing to pay for it, when love turns to labor, the end is in sight.
Lately, AI has been contributing to this problem. cURLer-in-chief Daniel Stenberg recently [19]dumped the cURL data transfer bug bounty program because it was buried in AI slop.
So what can we do about this? Miranda Heath, a psychology and philosophy doctoral student, recently released a paper on [20]burnout in open source , which addressed this. Heath wrote: "What if instead of leaving developers to learn to refuse or burn out trying, we give something back? A move towards a community in which OSS developers are recognized as worthy of gratitude for the hugely beneficial work that they do, in which they have social support, are treated with respect, and enabled to afford to live comfortably, is a move towards a community without OSS burnout. It is time to recognize the humans behind open source."
She's right. Much as it goes against my workaholic grain, we need to fundamentally change how we treat open source developers and what we expect from them. So why not, dare I say it, "take a break?" Heresy, I know, but it's time to change how we work in open source. Oh, and I guess writing too… maybe. ®
Get our [21]Tech Resources
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/npmx.dev/post/3merfmvybm22n
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/18/linus_torvalds_and_friends/
[3] https://bsky.app/profile/antfu.me/post/3meupr6m3pc2g
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aZyHvRlWRpXa-EiSsOlGMAAAAFQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aZyHvRlWRpXa-EiSsOlGMAAAAFQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aZyHvRlWRpXa-EiSsOlGMAAAAFQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aZyHvRlWRpXa-EiSsOlGMAAAAFQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/open_source_maintainers_underpaid/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aZyHvRlWRpXa-EiSsOlGMAAAAFQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://thenewstack.io/ffmpeg-to-google-fund-us-or-stop-sending-bugs/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/15/opinion_open_source_attract_devs/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/05/rust_foundation_announces_maintainers_fund/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/20/asahi_linux_asahi_lina/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/16/open_source_maintainers_state_of_open/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/16/open_source_maintainers_state_of_open/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/02/ingress_nginx_opinion/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/21/curl_ends_bug_bounty/
[20] https://opensourcepledge.com/blog/burnout-in-open-source-a-structural-problem-we-can-fix-together/
[21] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
That, and the feeling of being turned into unpaid employees of Microsoft, Anthropic etc etc.
Also worth remembering that often the biggest critic is yourself, and so the little voice whispers of the potential for someone else to find that hacky edge case that you weren't too happy with...
I'm glad they're taking time off. Rarity and absence will show their value. Somebody who is always there ends up being taken for granted.
All software (Both closed and open) is way more complicated than it was in the 80s/90s. More lines of code needs more human capacity/bandwidth to understand and manage it.
It's an addiction
typically...
"Hmmm. That doesn't look right. I'll just..."
6 months later.
"Oh! Wait! That's just shown up this. Better sort that out too."
CC0 and …
if you are silly enough to want use it… it's yours (and anyone elses) to use, love and maintain.
Like feeding the ducks in Hyde Park. If the ducks want more they can bake their own bread.
Basically ensuring somebody else's problem remains their problem and not your problem.†
I would be curious if there were differential burnout rates between GPL licensed projects and BSD or MIT etc licensed projects. I would punt the latter projects are more likely to picked up by the companies that use them either by supporting the project or bringing it in·house.
There is more to life than software, coding, tech etc; I suppose the hazard that those developers face who have had the temerity to take a weeks R&R, is that they might realised that there is actually more to life.
† The pretense of adopting someone else's problem is the profession of the consultant with a matching extortionate scale of charges.
I have seen people taking years long vacations when it comes to FOSS. Slackware was basically dead for several years, they just didn't tell people it was a vacation.
Many years ago ...
I created something known as LWJGL. It flourished and attracted other maintainers and eventually became quite popular. I must have put in maybe a couple of years of entirely unpaid labour into it, and the current maintainers have put in decades more. I say the current maintainers, because eventually a certain Markus Persson became unbelievably, unfathomably, extraordinarily rich off the back of my work, at a time when I was literally selling possessions just to pay the rent. Did he ever even think of sending a bean my way? Did he f---. And that was the last time I bothered making my work free.
So to summarise, entitled users and lazy infoseccers are the real problem. That and I suppose the rabid moral witch hunts that would go after any dev that just told such people "Fuck off, I'm doing this for me, not you"