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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[-] jlow@beehaw.org 3 points 6 months ago

I think the route of giving it all away for free and either offering hosting if the project needs it or (business) support is the most successful way of doing this.

I have no problems whatsoever with donation buttons / banners (like Krita does) but I'm afraid random donations is not really a sustainable model for most projects. I try to remember to donate to projects I use a lot (especially if it's for work) but it is another thing on my todo list and not one with high priority, so I don't do it as often as I'd like ... 😓

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 2 points 6 months ago

That's possibly fine for services, but what happens when a large, well-known competitor decides to offer the service at a lower price (possibly on their own infrastructure), takes away the customers, but doesn't contribute back?

Also, how should libraries (aka stuff that can't be hosted or doesn't have an interface) be handled?

Anti Commercial-AI license

[-] jlow@beehaw.org 1 points 6 months ago

Yeah, very good points. A while ago there was talk about some kind of foundation where maintainers could bill their hours and people and big tech companies could donate. Not sure if / how that would work ...

During the xz incident I also talked about this on Mastodon and someone suggested that big tech could just employ maintainers without them having to do anything for the company directly, just work on the project / library the company uses. Again not everybody would want to do that ...

I'm afraid there's no easy one-fits-all solution here.