Clerical Aspects of Publishing and Development
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) turns 40 in just 3 days (then Richard Stallman goes to give public presentations in Europe) and recently in Porto some GNU developers met, including Mr. Oliva from the FSF's Board. One of those attending wrote: "I had concluded that I was mostly a glorified Jira wrangler (the modern equivalent of the “paper pusher” slur one could use to denigrate anybody who doesn’t do Real Work™) and I wasn’t needed."
It's definitely real work. As I explained last summer, having to deal with 'babysitting' (online), do legal research and related work, even look after downtime, logs, backups etc. can be a lot of work. I wish I could spend 100% of my time just writing and coding; in the "real world", however, this is unrealistic. Even the best "legal hacks" have to spend some time on 'mechanical' stuff such as billing and judges in courts must deal with 'paper-pushing' (there are things their clerks of assistants cannot be entrusted to do fully, or get done without any supervision at all).
That Jira sucks is widely understood among geeks (it became super-bloated; I saw that when installing it from scratch in my own home), but the processes don't suck, they are often a necessity, especially when dealing with large groups of people. At work we used some alternatives to Jira; I recall at least 4 and those were not bloated.
To say that people who "only" write documentation or do bug 'gardening' don't matter is demeaning; a lot of Free software projects also rely on code reviews and some form of moderation (to weed out bad code, not necessarily bad people). In Debian, as Daniel Pocock once explained, they assigned volunteers to delete literally thousands of spam. That's a lot of mechanical, truly boring work; almost nobody would appreciate it or even know about it (not enough to say "thank-you"). There was no financial compensation for this work (chore).
I personally learned (over time) that even if just 50% of my time gets spent reading/writing it is the "cost of doing business" and not time wasted. I'm prepared to learn how to defend the site from overzealous Americans funded secretly by a third party to harass my wife and I. On top of all that there's food, sleep etc. but those aren't part of the above-mentioned 50%. Suppose for every hour spent writing code one should also devote 20 minutes to documentation (including comments in the code), 20 minutes reviewing other people's code, 10 minutes studying the latest documentation (of others), and wrestling with technical distractions (like some program freezing). That's a realistic scenario. The same goes for writing articles, not just code. In the workplace, there are always some unproductive persons who waste your time by inviting you to meaningless "meetings" or ask inane questions about what you do. That's just part of (corporate) life; it's not good use of one's life, it's not a necessary evil, but many companies just don't recognise a developer's need to focus (concentrate), which may require some solitude and less oversight/micromanagement.
In Free software, the management aspects are considerably reduced; this is why many people enjoy the relative independence and choose to write Free software, even if (or when) they don't get paid to do it. █