alt Hacker NewsI've said it before, open source works poorly in this area. It's great if everyone's getting paid fat money in a day job and can maintain their pet project a few days a month, but that's just not true for a lot of people.
It's disgusting that maintainers of critical projects have to go through the humiliation of begging for money, and absurd to suggest they all hang out Kofi or PAtreon banners. Realistically nobody is going to go through their bash history working out what utilities they use in order of frequency and allocating funds to the maintainers proportionally. I'm baffled that some entity like the Linux Software Foundation isn't administering this already.
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> Realistically nobody is going to go through their bash history working out what utilities they use in order of frequency and allocating funds to the maintainers proportionally.
Not if we don't make it easy for them. I had Claude whip up fundcli a while ago, but this post got me to finally upload it. It goes through your http://atuin.sh/ history (raw .bash_history/.*history doesn't have enough information) and generates links to projects for you to donate to.
git clone https://github.com/fragmede/fundcli
uv run src/fundcli/cli.py analyze
uv run ./src/fundcli donate --amount 100
I feel like this should have been the responsibility of investors and venture capitalists. In a normal society, the moneyed folks should give special treatment to the folks who have proven themselves to be effective givers.
Unfortunately, it seems like either the moneyed folks don't care or the current financial structure simply does not support this.
I wonder if a few people going beyond what is reasonable, is representative of open source projects.
For a lot of open source projects, if you have a normal day job and spend a few hours per week on a project, then the project just never gets very big. It exists, may have a few users. But on a larger scale, nobody knows it exists.
The exceptions are projects where developers spend a lot of time on the project at the expense of a day job. Though there is the possibility that they may have a hard time having a day job in the first place, which may have let to the situation with the open source project.
In general, I think we do have a culture problem where we think projects need to be successful. And people working on a project 'need' to support users (who in general don't pay).
And that expectation of free work happens throughout the open source ecosystem as well. Distributions expect projects to fix bugs for free. Open source projects expect libraries and compilers to be maintained.
Ultimately, change has to come from people who refuse to work for free. Doing something as a hobby for free is perfectly fine. As long as it stays within the scope of a hobby project.