Burnout in Open Source: A Structural Problem We Can Fix Together

Summary

Imagine this: you build something to address a need that you have. It works — and it works well! Realising it might be useful to others, you decide to share it as Open Source.To your surprise, it quickly becomes popular. Your work is valuable to others. It feels like a dream!Then the requests for features and fixes come pouring in. Some feel more like demands. You care deeply about what you have made, so you try your best to respond.You do this in your free time, but it starts to feel like a second job. Your working days get longer and longer — some nights you barely sleep. You know your work is valuable; massive companies are using it under the hood! It’s a rare day when anyone stops to say thanks for the hours you put in — but for them to offer any sort of financial support? Almost never.A pull request comes in. Someone earnestly trying to help? Nope — it’s clearly something they threw AI at without understanding the code.It carries on like this for months. The project you made for you, once a source of joy, is now a source of stress and anxiety. You feel profoundly unseen. Reluctantly, you begin to wonder: is it time to give up on the dream?I’m a psychologist, and I’ve been compiling a report on the problem of burnout in Open Source Software (OSS).Over the past 5 months I have interviewed OSS developers, read dozens of academic articles, and analysed 50 pieces written by members of the OSS community to try to identify the causes, and possible solutions, to OSS developer burnout.I have been struck to learn how much the software infrastructure we rely on every day is made possible by developers choosing to make their projects available Open Source, with over 96% of all companies depending on Open Source software. Even more striking, I discovered that choosing to make and maintain software as Open Source is putting developers at risk of the very real psychological harm of burnout.Burnout is an exhaustion of physical and mental energy, typically associated with work....