What is to be expected when the current trend among CEOs is to get the same stuff done with less employees and same salaries hence resulting in either you getting fired, resigning or doing x2 the amount of work with no real life improvements. Who would have the willingness to continue their side hobbies/project like contributions to open source when your main life is in shambles.
Open source should be funded by the tax-payers, or all code should be forcibly open-source (something like AGPL)
Any other models feels like they would create perverse incentives
Also recurring donations feels like a better way than one-time tips
How do you decide which open source projects are worthy of taxpayer money, and how much does a given project get?
I have a couple projects I’ve put up in GitHub as open source. Would they qualify? Or are you just talking about well known open source projects like Linux?
Same as all other tax funded projects, by some elected people who likely have no idea about the project.
Joking aside, we will see more of this funding due to governments moving to open source software as they tend to want to fund their own stuff.
If only there was a way to fund open source projects so we both could have better software for the world and paid employees…
I think you can guess which government body already do this. Just take a shot.
Big question is: how many of us are funding foss projects?
It isn’t difficult, and with how popular some are, it wouldn’t be long before the projects could hire one or more full time devs at good rates.
I support a few big projects I use every month through liberapay.
Love the enthusiasm, but let’s stop casting this as an end-user-only problem. The real issue is, once again, large corporations using and taking advantage of oss while putting ZERO money or work back into oss. It’s victim blaming with extra steps, and us blaming each other is exactly what the real culprits want.
If it makes us feel better that we can pay on a regulsr basis for these things, great. But massive oss projects can’t thrive on a few of us donating.
Large corporations and exploitative, over demanding individuals are always going to be this way. We can only prepare for these kinds. I agree on paying them subscriptions on a regular basis, just as we pay large corp projects, and more people need to be involved.
I hope you didn’t infer from my comment that we should stop individually supporting FOSS, that’s not what I’m saying.
However, I will counter that I don’t think you are current with the overwhelmingly massive imbalance of corporate vs personal use is currently in play on big Foss projects.
Ffmpeg is used by almost everyone with a video project, but not companies want to kick in any bucks:
https://m.slashdot.org/story/448966
We saw this back in 2015 as well with NTP, which almost everyone on the internet uses, yet the one guy who worked on it had to stop doing so temporarily in 2017 and get a job to support himself:
https://www.informationweek.com/it-infrastructure/ntp-needs-money-is-a-foundation-the-answer-
Not only do corps use FOSS at a higher rate by an order of magnitude than individual users, but they also profit from it.
Not at all. I support individual paying for foss projects and then corporations should be made to as well. Corporation will not have morals until there is social pressure, even so they just pretend to or regulated by government standards.
We are on the same page, if you read my other comments.
I think the bigger question is how many corporations are supporting foss projects? I’m sure a lot of us contribute a bit here and there if we can and I’m sure it makes a difference - but if some of these corporations, making billions of dollars profit, contribute just a tiny fraction of their wealth it could make a huge difference.
It’s the same argument as recycling, turning off lights, walking instead of driving etc. etc. - yes there are 8 billion of us and if we all do it, it will make a difference, but the difference we make is still not significant compared to corporate greed.
We are being gaslit to accept yet another scenario where we socialize the cost and privatize the profit.
A corporation has no obligations towards foss projects, no different to any individual being made to fund them.
This isn’t true, a lot of corporations use and benefit from the foss and they should be supporting those projects.
They should also be supporting projects that could replace the applications that they spend millions on each year. When your CIO says that they are using ‘whatever corpo system’ because a viable open source project doesn’t exist, they should start funding the non-viable projects so they can become viable.
Worse they often report issues that affect them but still don’t commit resources to resolving those issues.
For example, the developer of asus-linux.org who made the kernel contributions for Asus ROG laptops and the accompanying ROG Control Center recently walked away, due to exhaustion.
I couldn’t find anything about this on the Asus Linux blog, am I just dumb and looking in the wrong place? I use Asus-linux and didn’t know about this :(
Edit:
unfortunately it seems that bullshitters who make shit up on the spot have made their way over to Lemmyboo meFor myself, I make sure I’ve done my due diligence before I might accuse someone of dishonesty, rather than making a minimum effort.
From his Kofi: https://ko-fi.com/flukejones
I’ve burned out on LKML and many many other parts of the FOSS world. It’s exhausting. As such, I will not be working on Linux for asus device. It’s not something I can devote huge chunks of time to for free anymore.
Thank you everyone who has donated something over the last years.
Same on his Patreon
