The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

In businesses I've observed this behavior tends to surround dysfunctions in liability and understanding of liability organizationally and from business management.

If you make a purchasing decision, your ass is on the line when people ask why certain product/service isn't fulfilling some arbitrary business need. In theory, assuming the functionality is part of the advertised purchase, the liability of the thing you're paying for lies on that third party. You did your due diligence. If you chose some open source combination with in-house build, they're going to question why you didn't outsource some envisioned cheaper third party option (sometimes, this is a legitimate strategy, often from my experience it's not). So you default to big vendor big solution to protect yourself.

Apologies are made and blah blah, discussions about "what alternatives do/did we have" and you often end up landing on implementing some mixture of leveraging public domain software and in-house customization atop/leveraging it to solve the problem you were paying for. In the end, you end up doing what you probably knew was the correct path anyways: this vendor solution is questionable, it doesnt completely align with our business needs, and it's not going to get the actual need done. Conveying that to business leaders is often impossible though. So, to pass liability/responsibility and cover your ass with incompetent business leadership, you throw often thousands, tens, or hundreds of thousands away.

I've had this discussion so many times and sat in these meetings so many times it grows tiring. The fact is, sometimes a generic solution works for your business (Office for example is a pretty generic need and often aligns), often it really doesn't (some arbitrary more niche/custom thing you do? Maybe, good luck).

>> but what isn't clear to me is why maintainers don't ignore these people.

>One reason is that you're being told that that's an awful thing to do by basically every resource on "proper open-source" you can find.

The solution is clear. Just apply the grandparent's advice recursively:

Ignore these "resources" (!) on "proper open-source", too.

Also, that term sounds awfully entitled to me, too.

Who the heck is anyone to decide what constitues 'proper' open source "resources"? Total nonsense.

Everyone can have their own opinion about that, or not even bother to have an opinion, and just do exactly and only what they want for their own open source project, ignoring the naysayers, free-but-unwanted advice-givers, and freeloaders.

I didn't know that we were living in a socialist heaven. Hot tip: We are not.

I have one major objection.

It's easy to forget, due to the vast wealth of genuinely great volunteer-driven projects out there, that an overwhelming share of open source contributions are actually funded by capital. It's hard to imagine the Linux kernel, or llvm, or even projects like React ever fizzling out due to maintainer burnout or disinterest.

This is fascinating, in my opinion, because our systems of accounting and economical analysis are by design terrible at keeping track of externalities. They are not good at analyzing the potentially holistic value of mutualist projects. Largely speaking whatever cannot fit on a balance sheet becomes the province of philosophy and culture.

Despite all that, in the modern culture of tech companies, the value of FLOSS seems to be understood and the companies that recognize it genuinely seem to out-compete those that don't. They recognize the value it creates for them, even if it's very difficult to estimate the costs that are avoided by using a FLOSS system that would otherwise need to be licensed or built. Even if the completely optional act of using one's own resources to contribute to open source software does not easily map to an equivalent or greater return in accounts receivable or company valuation.

What I mean by this is that the sustainability of "open source" broadly speaking is already demonstrated and I don't see that changing any time soon. What's not demonstrated however is the sustainability of OP's project. I think this is a challenge that they and their users should tackle without implicating the entirety of open source software as a culture, or attempting to impose any responsibilities upon users of open source software that don't already exist.

A maintainer position for a software project is like any position or role, in say, a charity. You aren’t technically forced to do the work, but the charity announces publicly (on its web site, for instance) that the work will be done, and people expect it to be done. If you do not feel up to doing it anymore, you owe it to other people (who expect the work to be done) to announce your retirement and hand the position over to new people.

Any project which is not a going concern should:

A: Not, IMHO, be called a ”project”

B: Be clearly labelled, in its public-facing information, as being offered as-is, without any implied updates or future development.

> I would be willing to bet that 99% of these companies don’t neglect compensation out of malice.

There is no malice. FOSS is free and open. There are many softwares that chose to be paid ones and they are successful.