The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

There we go again. It seems only yesterday we had the same thread.

I choose an unusual hobby, that other people seems to find useful. Hence people should give me money.

I don't get it, I really don't.

If you enjoy working for free, by all means continue doing it. If you don't then stop. Nobody is forcing you. If you think your time and effort is worth more then you get now, go closed source, paid-support or whatever and see how much value you really bring to the market.

(I'm taking a -4 karma hit for this post, I know. I got it last time, do your worst)

The feeling of entitlement people have around open source is unsustainable.

If someone releases code then that's it. You have it. Do what you want with it (within it's licence). Be thankful.

Unless that guy specifically says he's going to maintain it for free you are entitled to exactly absolutely nothing more you ungrateful little git.

If you add this code to your project, you should fix and share any problems you encounter as a token of gratitude.

IMO Posts like this always basically boil down to "Hey, I did follow every best practice and did everything as I was told and yet it's not working out like how it was promised"

This is because the core premise is simply wrong. Sites such as opensource.guide are not written for you. They're written for people profiting from you thinking they're written for you. If you follow their guidance, you'll end up unhappy and writing posts like that.

The only way to escape this is to ignore that con and instead pick a sustainable business model. That can mean not open-sourcing at all, but I'd wager that most of the time, it just means saying no, setting boundaries and knowing your worth + the value you provide.

> I keep reading from project leaders like ESLint’s things like “if only they paid $1 each…” as if that made any economic sense at all. If they paid $1 each, you would not hand thousands let alone millions of users.

From another angle, if I gave a dollar a month to every Free Software program or library I used that month, it would cost me thousands of dollars a month. Obviously that isn't realistic. I have donated to projects before but those products need to individually make the case to me that my donation is needed. Expecting users to donate to every project they use by default just isn't realistic. Most projects won't get donations from most people most of the time; that's just the way it is. Developers should be at peace with this before they decide to personally commit themself to a project.

> All of the people who demand things from the maintainers are. Very few of them are willing to sponsor or pay consulting fees. If you give up they complain loudly, and then often pay a contractor to do the work they wanted.

Ignore them. I mean, it's not like they're paying you. Scratch your own itch instead.

I'm probably being dense, but I'm still not seeing a problem. I think if we dig, we'll find non-monetary incentives that open source authors are a bit shy about admitting to. Otherwise why hold on to the project at all? If you're not being paid, and you think you should be, and that's the only reason you're building the thing, just stop building it.

Open source isn't unsustainable. We've got decades of evidence of that.