Paying people to work on open source is good

Are there any open source projects that are monetized/pay their contributors?

If I ever get a successful startup going, I am going to explore this model.

It's a big community with a wide range of perspectives, but not so big that it can't be understood. To me the original community was mostly over a decade or two. This is similar to other communities such as a burgeoning genre of music. Whatever it was, it was established long before the words "Business Source License" were uttered. The first date range that comes to mind is 1993 to 2003 if it's one decade, or 1990 to 2010 if it's two decades. With the smaller range, you have the development of Linux, and the way Linux took over servers. With the larger range, there is Firefox taking on IE, as well as WordPress, Django, and Ruby on Rails becoming popular.

Even people who tried to fight it understand it. That is why before the deliberately misleading strategy being used now, some who wanted to promote code that could be read but couldn't freely be used settled for calling source available.

The experience as a programmer in this domain is amazing. Having these funded full time OSS contributors lets thousands of R enthusiasts (like me) benefit because someone incredibly high-leverage was paid to give a lot of their time to a project. So when you go to use that library, its docs are immaculate (I'm thinking all the tidyverse packages, Shiny, RMarkdown etc), and the examples are simple and brilliant. Getting up and running is often as little as taking an educated guess at how it would work, and often that's exactly how the function/package was designed! Having at least one dedicated person seems to dramatically improve the quality of OSS, possibly because it helps organise the dozens of people each making smaller contributions.

I suspect this works so well because open source projects sometimes don't attract attention to key areas like documentation, and UX (some of my most-loved OSS projects still have horrendous UX because, I suspect, contributors love to add things but nobody wants to be the person who organises it into a coherent package for users, much less remove people's contributions because they're unnecessary and confuse users).

When I contrast the experience with communities that have much fewer (or no) full time funded OSS contributors, there's much more niggle and inconsistency with libraries, interoperability, and especially in documentation.

Sorry, I'm rambling, but the R community has been an amazing example of how paying a few dozen full time OSS people can have a dramatically outsized benefit to the community for years to come. I'm very appreciative I get to stand on the shoulders of these humble giants.

There will always be points of view that would consider this (too) as a problematic source of funding (e.g., being suspicious of government actors and their motives) and it can be a major hassle to handle public sector bureaucracy, but given the distribution of demand for software in the economy it seems something natural to some extend and it could alleviate some of the sustainability issues with open source development.

But if it was the former, what a way to shoot oneself in the foot!