I see comments on posts such these very often where people complain about opensource products like Linux phones, Linux itself, or pretty much anything else, not being as good as their proprietary, funded, and profits driven alternatives. How are such projects supposed to compete without money and full-time developers? Especially when people are unwilling to donate to them "because they just aren't there yet", how do they expect the projects to quickly get to a point where they are boob friendly and usable?
People will disparage groups that try to make something with barely any funding and time. There are so many negative comments about the PinePhone, Phosh, PostMarketOS, and so on. It's disappointing to have such a community.
As soon as an opensource project asks for funds, integrates a question for funds in their software, uses a restrictive license or something like a business source license, someone will complain about it on social media and blow up the maintainers' repository and socials. Why are we so averse to opensource contributors earning a living writing opensource?
If people don't want to fund opensource (or "source available") until "it's ready" and resist any attempt to make money from it, how it the model supposed to succeed in being an alternative for the majority?
Sorry for the rant, but why can't we as a community be more active in supporting our opensource contributors instead just waiting for the apples to fall into our and their laps?
You are conflating the meanings of the word "free".
The intended freedom for open source software is not related to finance, it's related to legal rights.
This is fundamentally why open source struggles with a broader acceptance and why corporate interests continue to exploit the open source community.
Ultimately, the notion that software can be developed without money is both absurd and unsustainable.
I'm not blaming you for this common misunderstanding.
There is no misunderstanding, I'm well aware.
The answer to that is, "well, then sell it". If it's not free, sell it for a price tag. Will get rid of that notion right away.
Also make everything worse by having pirated versions full of malware everywhere and people defaulting to non-paid alteratives.
The problem you have is all of this is made freely available as donationware, so it shouldn't be a surprise WinRAR monetization rules apply.
Also, I didn't say "software can be developed without money". I listed like half a dozen of sources of money that can be used instead of (or more accurately alongside) individual donations and purchases of nonfunctional products. You are arguing with a misconception of a misconception, certainly not with the point I made.
Imo, probably the best way forward is some kind if SaaS model. Either like Red Hat where the software is open source and you pay for support, or else standalone software where you pay for access to an already running instance on the company's server rather than hosting your own (with maybe a noncompete clause in the license?).
But you'll still run into two problems in funding. Which is that first, most people care less about their data being sold than they care about not having to whip out their credit card. And second, that if you are doing a good, honest job of providing software to people without locking them in, ripping them off, or selling their data, then you probably won't get any venture capital funding - so less scrupulous competitors will likely establish market dominance with a slicker product (in the short term, at least).
That works. Home Assistant is unpaid open source, but they have a separate org that sells hardware boxes for profit and has a subscription service for server-side voice recognition and to handle auth over the internet for remote access without having to set that up yourself.
Makes sense as a service, it's decent value and it takes crap out of your hands you may not want to do even if you're hosting the software. Win/win, as far as I'm concerned. Just because your core project is OSS doesn't mean you can't sell other stuff related to it, from merch to support.
And if you don't want to have any of your data outside your home server... well, then don't do it and set up those services at home. You're paying for convenience, not for the software itself, so it's up to you.
Not every project will work well with that sort of scheme, but it's certainly viable, and nobody is particularly mad at HA for doing things that way.
But for an end user, it is free (as in pizza). The free (as in speech) aspect of open source necessarily implies a free financial aspect for end users as well, since if you can freely see and fork the source, then you can also freely download and compile it.
Open source struggles with adoption because it isn't as user friendly as for-profit software. And it struggles with funding because, by definition, it can't charge people for its use.
As MudMan said above, you can't expect vast swathes of individuals to just start paying for something that they can get for free. And people care less about their data being tracked than they do about having software that is user friendly.
You know what pisses me off in this conversation? The FOSS problems with adoption have nothing to do with funding, more often than not. Projects that are well put together, from Blender to Home Assistant to Linux itself, get funding just fine and there are well established ways to set up nonprofits and foundations and side channels in the commercial space. This is a solved problem, at least for big projects with deep penetration.
Open source struggles with adoption because it's an engineer-first space for small projects. The people donating their time for free are primarily highly motivated programmers that don't have an easy time getting UX, production and design help and don't want it in the first place because if they wanted to work for a non-programmer they'd go get paid. Which, hey, makes sense, and good for them for spending time for free, but that has consequences.
Which are that FOSS stuff is janky, hard to use, frustrating and unevenly executed. Sure, getting money for a project helps in that it allows you to actually hire people for those roles, but the problem isn't the money, it's the lopsided execution.
This week in FOSS world it's all about drama regarding bcachefs getting kicked out of the Linux kernel because the whole extremely consequential, well liked thing is made by some idiot who thinks he's too cool for the concept of a feature lock. Maybe you could pay the guy to not be a dick, but that's clearly not the problem.