Earlier this week I made a snarky toot about paying open source maintainers. The snarkyness perhaps covered up the underlying message, which is something I strongly believe in.
Criticizing open source maintainers for figuring out a way to get paid for their — however imperfect the tactic — is wrong.
If we're serious about open source sustainability, we need to be okay with — no, more than that, we need to celebrate — any tactic a maintainer uses to get paid.
@jacob great post! I am team lead for an open source project (Keyman) and am funded, along with a team of 6 devs, from a variety of sources, individual donations and churches making up the bulk. Keyman used to be proprietary purely because we couldn't find a way to fund development -- and we got lots of people yelling at us for charging for it. That is much better now but funding is still a challenge every day!
@marc churches, interesting! What’s fundraising from churches like? I sorta imagine it might be a bit easier because charity is already something pretty familiar to them… but also I can imagine that explaining open source to a church leader might be interesting.
@jacob the first priority for all open source projects should be long term sustainability - a dead project is no good to anyone.
Then we can worry about rug pulls by powerful interests, so taking a page out of distributive justice, something like a project covenant that guarantees all changes must benefit the most marginalised users would be useful. This could be enforced in various ways, by a foundation or the traditional BDFL.
Of course most projects are still at step 1, so yeah, get paid.
@jacob I think source-available code is good and should be the norm, and I think everyone benefits when Free/Open Source Software developers get paid. But, I do have a major issue with relicensing to "screw amazon" licenses like Business Source License, or adopting RedHat's (and GRSec, remember those guys?) non-disclosure policies around source code, because it's a bait-and-switch for all the users. Meanwhile, proprietary software doesn't pretend to be something it's not (usually).
Then there’s the egomaniac problem that the developer will gain and refuse to accept better quality content because the developer believes their ideal product should stay as is, such is the fate for Renpy because Pytom refuses to add more than just VN.
I get what you’re saying but nothing always ends up as you expect.
@firecat either I'm missing your point or you're missing mine because you seem to be saying that "sometimes it ends badly" is a reason why it's ok be be a dick to maintainers who take money.
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