Opinion If you want to see the definition of "workaholic," you can't do better than to look at your typical senior open source developer or maintainer. I should know, I'm a workaholic too. I know my kind.
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 taking a week off to recharge.
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 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.
It's been that way since the start. Eric S. Raymond, an early open source leader, explained in his 1998 essay "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."
That's a very powerful motive. Now combine this with what Raymond described in 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.
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, 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.
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 FFmpeg telling Google to either fund them or stop sending them CVE-sloppy bugs.
The result is that even the most devoted developers can burn out. Take, for instance, 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 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 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. ®
Source: The register