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The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software is Unsustainable (trstringer.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There are plenty of people who get paid to write open source software. The internet simply wouldn’t exist without OSS:

Linux/Android
Apache/Nginx
MySQL/Postgres
gcc/llvm

And that’s just scratching the surface.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Right, there's plenty of people also not getting paid anything for their work. This "You shouldn't care about money" feels like a straw man argument to OP's argument which I think could also be said as "OSS isn't sustainable unless everyone is paid a sustainable amount".

It's just all around frustrating. It has that same energy as "You criticize the system yet you're a part of it" example. For example, I wont be able to show this thread to my landlord when rent is due saying, "You shouldn't care about money, I'm an OSS dev so I dont"

So in closing, I guess I wish everyone had a UBI to be sustainable and then yeah OSS itself could be sustainable as a hobby project.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Never said devs shouldn’t care about money. If you aren’t having fun maintaining some code, stop. If it is commercially interesting, you will probably be contacted. Charge for bug bounties. Prioritize features based on compensation. Start a foundation. There are lots of business models for OSS, the author of this article talks about how this problem is already solved - just not for him.

OSS itself is not a business model. OSS is provably sustainable. Dude just wants it handed to him.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I never said someone shouldn’t care about money. That was never my argument.

My argument was that people who DO care about money have been claiming it’s going to usher in the demise of OSS and yet it thrives.