How are companies or developers supposed to make a full time living with OSI opensourced projects? (opensource.org)

submitted 6 months ago by onlinepersona@programming.dev to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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There has been a lot of talk about companies and individuals adopting licenses that aren't OSI opensource to protect themselves from mega-corp leechers. Developers have also been condemned who put donation notices in the command-line or during package installation. Projects with opensource cores and paid extensions have also been targets of vitriol.

So, let's say we wanted to make it possible for the majority of developers to work on software that strictly follows the definition of opensource, which models would be acceptable to make enough money to work on those projects full-time?

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[-] lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 13 points 6 months ago

Three examples of open source software where at least one developer could give up their regular job and work full-time on the open source project. I'm sure there's more (The Linux kernel maybe ?) :

Mastodon
Lichess
SerenityOS

In both cases possible because of people donating. The last example is quite remarkable given the personal history of the developer and the fact that it was "just" a fun project with the developer sharing videos about programming for the fun project.

[-] Deckweiss@lemmy.world 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

KDE also has multiple full time employees afaik

[-] merthyr1831@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

Serenity does have donors, but most of the donations are for Ladybird, their libre browser stack separate from Mozilla/Safari/Chromium. Most of the money came specifically from donors looking for improved support for their own websites on Ladybird.

[-] lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 months ago

Okay. Got a source for that ? I had the impression from the SerenityOS developer that the donations came because of the videos that Andreas is making but I could be wrong.