This Thanksgiving, buy Cranberry sOSS to fund open source • The Register
The Open Source Pledge organization is working to combat the problems of FOSS maintainers not getting paid, and the closely related issue of developer burnout, with a Thanksgiving-themed campaign.
The Cranberry sOSS campaign is a slightly confusing fundraising effort that probably works best if you are both American and pronounce its name in an accent affected by the Cot-Caught merger. The Reg FOSS desk is neither, but still thinks that hardworking coders, including that random person in Nebraska, should be rewarded, and hey, the campaign’s heart is in the right place (possibly in a small plastic bag along with its gizzard and liver). And yes, the fundraiser really does involve buying jars of cranberry sauce to support open source maintainers. As the website says:
The Open Source Pledge started just over a year ago and its efforts to make people more aware of the risks of developer burnout are serious. In a slightly less regionally specific way than the Cranberry sOSS campaign, the Open Source Pledge project is using the research of thanks.dev to identify exactly where the money should go.
The Pledge project isn’t all whimsy. It is also promoting some genuine research. Yesterday, it published an article, “Burnout in Open Source: A Structural Problem We Can Fix Together.” It’s written by psychologist Miranda Heath, who recently published a 47-page study titled “A Report on Burnout in Open Source Software Communities” [PDF].
In this, she defines what burnout means, looks at the evidence for it and literature about it, identifies its causes, and offers some recommendations for what can be done to reduce it. The six main causes that she highlights are:
And her recommendations?
The Open Source Pledge in general and right now the Cranberry sOSS effort are working on the first, and we can all help with the last. In between, though, having this formalized, written down, and published might help persuade some finance directors that this is something they should do.
Bootnote: When is Thanksgiving anyway?
Readers in the US will already know: Thursday, November 27. In Canada, it’s been and gone, October 13. In Britain, where we don’t celebrate it in any very visible way, it’s the harvest moon closest to the Autumn Equinox. The equinox was on September 22 this year meaning that the nearest full moon was October 7. ®
