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?
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.