Content Warning: Depiction of Drowning. Depression.
The consequences for not supporting another are upon all of us. The true power of the free and open software is not only the volunteer efforts, but the advocacy inside enterprises ensuring we all succeed.
Lip and Sy walked across the Gothenburg pier. It was spring in Sweden which meant there were glimpses of sun throughout the day, but it was still so cold they could see their breath as they talked.
"They don't have the money, there is nothing we can do", Sy sighed. The two loved working on problems together to an unhealthy degree. In the office they had to beg their colleagues to not work as much as them, as they would frequently stay up hacking into the early hours of the morning.
Their current issue was with a customer who didn't have the money to afford reliable uptime for their applications. They kept having outages that were costing any budget they could have had to spend fixing the problem. Lip kept brainstorming for a better way, difficult problems are always fun especially when they don’t directly impact you. The two finished their beers and went back to the office for another late night. After a couple of weeks, Lip and Sy presented an open source solution to the customer's uptime problem, something they had cooked on weekends and nights. The customer tested it out and adored it, it was rolled out quickly.
Over the years the project continued on. Lip changed jobs, Sy had two kids. Lip spent all their free time keeping the project alive. Sy spent all their free time keeping two children, a company, and a relationship alive. The libraries the project was dependent on were always changing and needing upstream remediation, dealing with CVEs, and aiding with onboarding of new adopters. To have a project be adopted by large enterprises was validation. Positive feedback poured in waves, "It is so simple, and it just works".
Lip could see the water at his feet, Lip splashed in the puddle and laughed. Open source is fun.
Enterprise feature requests and complaints about slow turnaround time came in. OpenAI was an early adopter and their engineers came in asking about scalability and testing. Lip couldn't afford to test at the size they wanted, the costs would have been astronomical for an individual with a personal AWS account and a credit card. OpenAI disappeared, and came back later stating they were running it successfully in production, but refused to add their names to the adopters list due to "legal and security reasons". This happened again, with Netflix, whose engineers worked closely with Lip to integrate the tool into their cloud platform. The Netflix engineers assured Lip that Netflix would love to bring him on as a contractor once it was in production, but once it was deployed they vanished.
Lip looked at the water around his ankles. They smiled because Lip could still jump in what was once a puddle, but also feel the water start to resist his ability to walk forward.
It wasn't soon after this Lip was laid off from his current job. "No matter," Lip thought, "my code is successfully deployed in multiple billion dollar enterprises". Those who adopted Lip's open source project would talk to them, request features, or and set timelines on them, but wouldn’t employ Lip. Rejection emails hurt less than ignored Slack messages. Was Lip only a good engineer if they worked for free? Everyone could run their code in production but no one would hire them to write code for their own enterprise.
Lip took a deep inhale, and their mouth filled with water. They gasped for air. The water was up to their face now. No problem, Lip thought, I can swim.
In the bane of entrepreneurial mindset, taking a tough situation and turning it into an opportunity, Lip decided to try and make a company around the open source project. Perhaps if these large companies don’t have headcount to hire Lip, then they at least have some money to pay for the features they’re asking for? Lip stumbled across a sales cofounder, and they forged a startup. They believed this was the break they were looking for, finally they could be taken seriously and make money off this.
Lip swam and swam, there was no sight of land. There was no choice but to keep going.
After a year of customer calls, pivoting, they were growing. Calls with investors and acquisitions teams that understood the use case and how critical it was to its adopters. With a pitch deck in hand, they were meeting with companies that were starting to see the value. “It is too good, it just works”, companies would say. Another call would be requested for the two to join, requesting features from these enterprises to meet their use cases. Lip and their cofounder were excited, this was the breakthrough they needed.
“Why would I pay for the enterprise version if the open source version meets our needs?”, the interested parties would ask, ending the call.
Lip’s arms were tired from swimming. They decided to float for a bit and take a break. When they opened their eyes, a brief second later, all they saw was darkness. They were under water, sinking. The force of the water on top of them acting as a weighted blanket, they lifted their hand up to ask for help.
“I guess we can just fork the repository and maintain it ourselves”, muttered some of the adopters. “We tried to recreate the work on our own, but we ended up wasting so much time”, responded another. There was no appreciation for the amount of dedication it takes to remediate CVEs and keep dependencies up to date, especially with underlying libraries changing their APIs with no guarantees. There was no comprehension about the amount of work it is, how expensive the years of knowledge were. What previously was free, will now cost them tremendously.
Gravity was to heavy too fight. The darkness was safe. The bed was comforting.
Slack pinged Lip, begging for updates on when they would release next. “Please, my company needs this feature for this epic to be complete”. Underneath it all, Lip recalled the conversations with their friends of the last decade. Those who supported their effort externally, but would complain to Lip about how their solution would never be adopted at their company. Those who couldn’t muster up the courage, out of fear of losing their own jobs, to ask their company if they could hire Lip. They replayed laughs over beers in their head next to the pain of perceived rejection from them.
The final tidal wave of feeling was loneliness.
Divided we beg, together we bargain.