Yeah but you don’t contribute tens of thousands every year so if you’re one of 3 contributors on a project so big it takes 100 hours of work a week to develop and maintain, that’s not enough. The sad part is nearly nobody donates. And those who do, often do it one-off, not monthly. I’m guilty too. Most 100% unmonetized FOSS projects just don’t have a stable revenue stream and to make it worse, the users can be real assholes, hounding the devs to work more or put someone else in charge to accept PRs quicker, etc.
Really depends on the business model. If it’s business software, I very well might because it’s cheaper to finance hours for improvements than to commission custom code from third parties. I’ve worked at a number of companies that operate this way - letting the lead spenders define future work while the small fries just take what’s on offer.
Most 100% unmonetized FOSS projects just don’t have a stable revenue stream and to make it worse, the users can be real assholes, hounding the devs to work more or put someone else in charge to accept PRs quicker, etc.
Sure. It’s far from a perfect system. But public financing of projects and official lines of communication can improve this significantly.
Universities are great at churning out FOSS applications for this reason. A lot of the mainline software has derivative applications. So you’ll get a library that’s great at file management/transfer used for purely academic work and financed by a public grant to that end. But then you’ve got people picking up the library updates on Git and applying them to all sorts of tangential projects without needing to go out of pocket to finance it.
They might contribute bug reports and the occasional feature improvement (or just fork and let the OG authors pick up improvements as they please). But they aren’t on the hook for thousands of dollars to use something that is just a useful improvement to existing technology.
Yeah but you don’t contribute tens of thousands every year so if you’re one of 3 contributors on a project so big it takes 100 hours of work a week to develop and maintain, that’s not enough. The sad part is nearly nobody donates. And those who do, often do it one-off, not monthly. I’m guilty too. Most 100% unmonetized FOSS projects just don’t have a stable revenue stream and to make it worse, the users can be real assholes, hounding the devs to work more or put someone else in charge to accept PRs quicker, etc.
Really depends on the business model. If it’s business software, I very well might because it’s cheaper to finance hours for improvements than to commission custom code from third parties. I’ve worked at a number of companies that operate this way - letting the lead spenders define future work while the small fries just take what’s on offer.
Sure. It’s far from a perfect system. But public financing of projects and official lines of communication can improve this significantly.
Universities are great at churning out FOSS applications for this reason. A lot of the mainline software has derivative applications. So you’ll get a library that’s great at file management/transfer used for purely academic work and financed by a public grant to that end. But then you’ve got people picking up the library updates on Git and applying them to all sorts of tangential projects without needing to go out of pocket to finance it.
They might contribute bug reports and the occasional feature improvement (or just fork and let the OG authors pick up improvements as they please). But they aren’t on the hook for thousands of dollars to use something that is just a useful improvement to existing technology.