Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

Hard disagree on that. Maintaining (bug triage, pull requests review, bug fixes…) is actually the hard work and the part that deserve the reward IMO.

When I contribute to an open source software to fix a bug/add a feature, my reward is that the software I use has an annoying bug gone/the feature I want. I don’t need any reward. On the other hand, the thankless maintainer deserve it.

Which is _exactly_ what we are doing...

> If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last?

That doesn't answer the GP question, which is all about incentives.

The answer is, at least some parties won't pay for what they can get for free. So the options are:

a) deal with it

b) require payment

c) come up with some way to incentivize more donations

This is a model that MPAA and RIAA use. And their equivalents in countries that have functional copyright legislation. Most first world countries have one. Don't get me wrong, they are mostly rent-seeking racketeers, but if you try to weasel out of paying for stuff you're using for your own profit, you're bound to get one.

Either some law pertaining to maintenance of "digital commonwealth" or some other nice name is passed in enough countries so other countries have to follow suit if they want to be in good company, and organizations with teeth, one per country, are set up to make sure the "digital commonwealth" tax is collected from everyone, big and small. They will even distribute money among creators, by usage or something.

Microsoft would probably love to be such an arbiter. They have Github. They have all the stats. They know if your company had been naughty or nice, how many times they downloaded your stuff, and how many times their employees were demanding shit in issues. It's child's game to join the party, just have an account with them.

Or we just piggyback on the existing copyright legislation and give RIAA and their likes more power and custody of making sure OSS maintainers don't starve. They will surely protect their interest with eagerness, who wouldn't like more profit?

Of course, companies will try to fight tooth and claw. They will tell you all sorts of doomsday scenarios, how the poor megacorporations won't be able to afford it, how they will have to raise your subscription fees. Gee, haven't we seen those crocodile tears when free roaming in EU was going to be established? We also know how it ended: they all sucked it up, complied, maybe their profits took... well... not a hit, but a nudge maybe. Companies who have to buy music know how to pay the music tax to copyright racketeers. They will get used to that.

They will also be happy to pay just one entity and be done with it. And if you dare start a company using F/OSS, you're in for the largest financial hit. The little man always suffers the most in such schemes.

You've put your finger on the core of the issue with FiloSottile's suggestion. The problem is that to sell something to a big corporation, you need to have something tangible you can sell. What you have are enormous pieces of widely used software, being given away for free. Many companies are going to take that and run with it, and forgo a support contract entirely. You may argue that they want support when there's an issue, but the truth is they're happy enough with the status quo and just complaining a lot.

In FiloSottile's model, a corporation needs to use your software for something specific, but also expects to need changes to it or prioritized issue support and approaches you; you send them an invoice with five zeroes on it as a bill for your services and they are heavily incentivized to pay for it.

Unfortunately that's not the reality for 99.9% of open source maintainers, a figure that includes most creators of popular software like VLC. I've personally contributed to a bunch of projects and maintain some of my own, but it's a hobby. As far as I know no corporations are even using any of them. Figuring out some software niche that no one yet has a product it, building it, and waiting for a corporation to swoop in and drop me a six figure yearly check cannot be a career strategy.