This morning, while scrolling through Twitter, I came across an article written by the author of core-js a couple of days ago, about his experiences developing open source software. His experiences are indeed eye-opening and heart-wrenching. What is most shocking and saddening is that the core-js, which the author has put a lot of effort into developing and maintaining, has indeed gained everyone's attention and recognition (it has nearly 20k stars on GitHub), and this software library is also widely used (the total download volume on npm has reached 9 billion, 52% of the top 1000 websites use core-js, and 75-80% of the top 100 websites use it).
However, such widespread recognition and use has not brought any income to the author. The peak period of a few hundred dollars in monthly donations is not at all commensurate with the time and effort required to maintain the project. Added to the fact that the author is unemployed and in a rather sensitive country, the income is indeed a bit lacking, and can even be considered impoverished. This led to the author not being able to raise enough money for compensation after a traffic accident, and he even served ten months in prison. It's very tragic, but for some users, they feel it has nothing to do with them, and even think that the help and donation requests made by the author in the project are polluting the open source ecosystem, which has also earned him many haters.
Looking at it this way, it's really hard to do open source individually. If there is no full-time job with a stable income, or a way to monetize open source into income and traffic, it's really hard to make a living solely from open source projects, and it's really hard to keep up the good development and maintenance quality with love. Especially compared to the high income of the Internet industry / cs development, it is too discouraging.
Perhaps it's because using open source projects is too simple and easy. A search on the open source community, a command line knock, and others' hard work can be used for oneself immediately. Users easily overlook the effort and achievements required to develop and maintain open source projects. Everyone's attitude towards open source projects has become taken for granted - it's expected that the author writes for everyone to use, provides maintenance and demand development support, and even some users think it's the author and maintainer's duty to answer usage problems and provide technical support. And what will most users give in return? Give a star as a token of appreciation.
A few months ago, I was still immersed in the beauty of the open source ecosystem, thinking that the atmosphere of mutual aid, sharing, and dedication in the open source community was great, very friendly to developers, and even considered whether to choose a job related to open source software to contribute to the community. The harsh reality makes one sober, and one must consider more. I also hope that everyone can consider more, for the open source community and open source developers, don't take it for granted.