Goodbye, Open Source
The game I playing no longer existed.
https://www.businessinsider.com/open-source-developers-burnout-low-pay-internet-2022-3
I am Edward J. Yoon, an emeritus member of the Apache Software Foundation and the creator of Apache Hama.
For a long time, I believed I had burned out.
Only later did I understand that exhaustion was not the cause.
The real reason was simpler — and more unsettling.
The game I thought I was playing no longer existed.
I came of age in the Hadoop ecosystem, part of a generation of open-source projects that openly emulated Google’s internal infrastructure. Back then, this was not considered theft. It was the natural order of things. Google published papers. The community implemented ideas. Those implementations, slow and imperfect, gradually hardened into industry standards.
There was a rhythm to it.
A fragile balance.
And for a brief moment, it worked.
Then, quietly, it stopped.
Google made a decision — not loudly, not maliciously, but decisively. It would no longer accept a world in which external implementations of its internal research became the default standard. Under the banner of “opening innovation through the cloud,” Google released fully managed, production-grade systems: Dataflow, TensorFlow, and others. They arrived already battle-tested, backed by real traffic, real operational experience, and resources that might as well have been infinite.
For distributed systems, this was not competition.
It was extinction.
Without real-world traffic pressure, without constant failure, without cost constraints and operational feedback, systems do not evolve. They stagnate. And in that moment, individual developers and volunteer communities were not merely outpaced — they were structurally locked out of the future.
No amount of passion could bridge that gap.
No amount of correctness could survive hyperscale reality.
So I left.
Not in anger.
Not in protest.
I left because staying would have required pretending the world had not changed.
There was a moment when this truth fully settled in.
At AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, I walked the exhibition floor and saw people I deeply respected — open-source developers who had shaped entire eras of computing. They stood behind tiny booths, like hot-dog carts parked in front of luxury department stores built on the very ideas those developers had once given away.
The contrast was brutal.
And impossible to unsee.
That was when my emotional connection to open source finally broke.
What followed was not recovery, but fragmentation.
As AI and automation rose, GitHub filled with endless forks, derivative projects, and experimental variations. Code multiplied rapidly, but its meaning thinned out. What once felt like a shared journey inside a coherent community dissolved into a sea of indistinguishable artifacts.
Code stopped telling stories.
Quantity replaced authorship.
Noise drowned out intention.
It reminded me of the “dead internet theory” — a space that still moves, still generates activity, but no longer feels alive.
At the same time, something else quietly disappeared.
Corporations abandoned the philosophy of service-oriented software. Stewardship gave way to speed. Rapid prototyping, fast market validation, and accelerated release cycles became the only metrics that mattered. Developers were no longer trusted to shape direction. They became units of labor, optimized for velocity.
In that world, open source is no longer a commons.
It is a quarry.
So when I read articles today about open-source maintainers burning out, I don’t recognize a new crisis. I recognize a delayed realization — the slow acknowledgment of a structural collapse that began years ago.
This was never just about money.
It was about agency.
About meaning.
About the right to shape the future rather than merely maintain its leftovers.
And once those are gone, burnout is not a failure.
It is the only rational response left.
