alt Hacker News>it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments
Yes it absolutely is. That is the exact social contract people 100% willingly enter by releasing something as Free and Open Source. They do give it as a gift, in exchange for maybe the tiny bit of niche recognition that comes with it, and often times out of simple generosity. Is that really so incredible?
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Agreed. Supporting open source maintainers is a great idea in general, but shaming people for using something according to the exact license terms it was released with is getting old.
It's crazy to expect someone to pay for something that you're giving them for free.
A natural solution for this kind of problem would be either a private or public grants program. Critical infrastructure built by random uncompensated people... ideally there would be some process for evaluating what is critical and compensating that person for continued maintenance.
The problem is more so maintenance.
The expectation of FOSS is that the users and maintainer work together to resolve bug fixes/features/security issues.
However many companies will dump these issues to the maintainer and take it for granted when they are resolved.
It's not a sustainable model, and will lead to burnout/unmaintained libraries.
If the companies don't have the engineering resources/specialization to complete bug fixes/features, they should sponsor the maintainers.