alt Hacker NewsI highly suspect that these people who push for paid open source are NOT open source maintainers.
If I wanted to get paid for the software I make in my free time, I would put a price on it.
If someone likes what I do personally, they can donate on my Patreon or kofi or whatever.
If I want my project to only be used for other free software, then I make it GPL or AGPL. That's it.
If someone uses my software and works for a company and needs support, we can talk about a support contract.
Replies
Much of the article is about getting people to pay for services around open source, specifically package registries. Big users paying to use a package registry hardly sounds unreasonable.
its not actually clear what the article is about, and it has the usual journalistic conflation of concepts (market cap is not the same thing as income!).
I don't expect to get paid for the open source work I do in my free time. But I would also really like it if I could work on open source software full time (or for the software I work on at my day job to be open source), but to do so I would need a source of income from somewhere.
Some definitely are, but I think you're right to keep an eye out. I don't think that the thing open source needs is more foundations with compensated presidents and community managers and fundraising departments