How a became an open source contributor
I frankly didn’t expect this, but we’re having a follow up to AppImage is distro (not) agnostic. I’ll be honest, I felt that rejecting my initial report was unfair. To add to that, the website now says that Ubuntu is supported (with no mention of a version) and any distro is supported through AppImage. Which only makes me feel even more unfair, as I clearly saw that the goal is support for any distro. Also, I didn’t believe that the setup worked on Ubuntu, so I set out to prove the haters GAIA maintainers wrong.
I downloaded Utubum 24.04 LTS (the was supposedly supported) and man, did you know, that the image is over 6 gigs nowadays? 😲 Good luck burning it to the DVD. But hey hoe, that’s the future for you. I didn’t wanna be hassled with physical setup, so I spun it in the VM. BTW, don’t ever use Bubuntu, for any reason. Gnome has some strange issues. It’s also easily the most bloated desktop environment. They recently raised the system reqs to 6GB of RAM. More than Windows 11. And of course by virtue of being Debian based, you can’t get common tools like fastfetch. Who cares they fixed it in 25.04, when I have to use older version? Anyway, turns out, GAIA couldn’t do anything, like at all, because it depended on curl, to pull uv to set up the virtual environment and so the party ended before it had a chance to start. Sigh.
I swallowed my anger, and with the help of AI, I produced a follow-up as polite as I could. The issue is linked in the old piece, here’s the link again, if you wanna see what I actually said. I thought, that despite they shut me down, maybe they are working on the issue, as obviously they want their project to work. I noticed a new version, so I gave it a shot and no bueno. Also, the curiosity took the hold of me and I wanted to try the workaround. But I wasn’t able to replicate the UI in the browser, the AppImage seemed to not have the front-end at all. As a gentle reminder, I tagged the guy who previously shut me down.
Reproduced end-to-end on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS + GNOME Wayland and cross-checked against the reporter’s logs. Five independent failure classes block the AppImage from delivering a working UI.
WOW! I am humbled. Put aside that they previously shut me down, because I did tell them the truth and they reproduced my truth! I feel vindicated. Long story short, with version 0.17.06, GAIA seems to work on Bubuntu. Did I mention that the reason they shut me down originally, is likely because they were using .deb version installed by apt? Anyway, on my bug report, they hardened the testing for AppImage. Sadly, it still doesn’t work smoothly on my actual Arch machine, but that is the plight of modern software.
Finally, in the changelog (?) they mentioned me as an “external contributor”! They are thanking me for reporting a bug. I feel really happy. I didn’t even know that they care enough to thank me. I was just trying them to make it work on my machine. As a side note, it was actually quite a lot of work. And recently I got a fiber internet, so at least I didn’t have to wait that long for the Utubum to download, but still. Installing it from scratch, drafting a report, making sure it’s polite, waiting for the release, following up, etc. Here’s the thing though: I did the work not only for free, but with no expectations, not even a thank you (which I got and I thank the team for engaging with me).
At my day job, I was telling my colleague: “If we stopped paying these people, they would stop coming to work here. That is the sort of a place we run.” My colleague was confused and replied: “That’s sort of a point of a job - to get paid. Why would anyone work without pay.” A different colleague of mine heard about this, ask asked me how do I imagine it should work. I told him, as I do often nowadays, that if he doesn’t understand it already, I can’t explain it. (I did try though.) I will not attempt to give exhaustive answer here, but since I am free to say what I like on my website, I will give you a clue.
There are many “jobs” people (still, but I think it’s gonna change some day, as for some reason we can’t stop the slavery), like being a parent. While nowadays in the UK parents cry that child care is more expensive than what they make (I would suggest to those people to act rationally and take care of their kid full-time, since that is clearly saving them money), meaning they feel entitled to some sort of state support (mind you, their parents would and will help for free - and that’s kinda my point), they don’t expect to be compensated for the act of raising their own kid. It costs a lot of money and takes a lot of effort, but people do it, not expecting to be paid. Do you think that’s not relevant? Okay, changing gears.
I could give you some concocted examples from real life (say a pastor who doesn’t get paid, or only gets paid part time to do his ministry - I know few of them in this situation), they won’t be very good, as they are tainted be the reality of modern people needing money. That’s why the idea of working for free is so confusing for so many people. They think: “If I spend most of my time doing something that doesn’t result in my getting paid, how will I buy my food and how can I pay my rent? To really understand the idea, we therefore need to reach into work of fiction. In The Fountainhead, brilliant architect that designs original buildings, gets approached by his university colleague, who begs him to help him design an estate, that no one was able to design yet. Of course, the problem is, if he could do it, why wouldn’t he submit the plans himself? The answer is, the officers who approved the plans hate him for his originality, so he can’t do it in his name. He agrees to design the project, forfeiting all fees and any credit, for as long as the plans will be executed how he envisioned them, no alterations. His colleague asks if that’s a fair arrangement, as he’s in it mostly for the money. The original architect answers:
You’ll get everything that society can give. You’ll take the money, the fame and the gratitude and I’ll take that which nobody can give a man except himself. I will have built Cortlandt.
Exactly. The question is, do you wanna achieve stuff or do you wanna earn money? Again, I understand that in year of our lord 2026, we all need money, but at the same time, the money is not really the driver of a human being. You have to get the money as you know it out of the equation. In one of the Malcolm Gladwell books, he proposed a thought experiment, that is helpful here. Imagine I can give you a choice. Now, due to inflation, I will give relative figures, so people late to the party can figure out the point. I can give you a job for life and you get to decide if a) you want to be an architect on 5x the minimum wage or b) you want to be a tollbooth attendant on 3x the architect wage. Once you choose, you can’t ever do any other job. What would you choose? Personally, I prefer architecting software, but the point the book makes, is that most people choose the architect, as the money is more than enough and comes with status. And personally, I hate telling people I work minimum wage slave job. I’d do anything else, even if it means I won’t be paid more, just to escape not even the minimum wage part, but the slave part. I know I would pick less money (obviously it would need to be enough) and status over more money and shame. Fortunately, the low status comes with low pay, so this dichotomy doesn’t exits in the wild. /s
If you still don’t get it, then I might write a dedicated piece some time in the future, but for now, let me rejoice that I became open source contributor be mistake. And I didn’t expect to be paid, and even now I don’t expect it. I did it for the sole reason so it is I who helped, nobody else. As I said above, this took actually quite a bit of my time, yet, no payment of any kind was ever in question. I worked, because I wanted to get a job done, not for a payment. I could quote The Fountainhead again, but let me end by quoting Terry Davis (RIP):
I like to do my own work because I have a theory that if you enslave somebody then slavery gets imposed on you in a hidden form. What you do to others gets done to you.
Jerry’s final thought: The accidental GAIA contribution was not free labour, but an independent effort to make ends meet (usually an aphorism for money, but technical ends need to meet, too). It’s a strange kind of magic to see your name in a changelog for a problem you documented just to prove a point. My daily driver might still be affected, but now I’m sure I can help fixing the situation as an “external contributor.” On to the next bug.