alt Hacker News> It's indeed ridiculous how the world's trillion dollar private companies run on essential software that idealistic open-source maintainers build basically for free while scrambling to even make basic income.
The most ridiculous thing is that idealistic open-source maintainers are still doing it, while this is being an established status quo for at least 30 years. Or maybe they have their incentive, and, while I don't find it palatable too, large corporations understands that. What's _your_ incentive in having such strong opinions about that ?
Honestly the most ridiculous part is that open-source maintainership is so easy to monetize.
All you have to do is declare a simple ULTIMATUM.MD:
I hereby guarantee that all project maintenance work will be deferred indefinitely if there are insufficient funds to continue maintenance work.
Project costs are split fairly according to a simple formula: pledge = maintenance budget / participants.
Pledgers can set a private maximum total bid during the campaign window. Generous pledgers can optionally set the maximum number of pledges they grant the project within their total bid.
I guarantee that received funds will not be used to build up project savings to extend the maintenance window beyond the funded window and that there will be no simultaneous campaigns to secure funding for future time periods beyond the current funded window.
I guarantee that the pledger's identity, maximum total bid, number of pledges, will be kept private to protect them from pledge analysis attacks that automatically infer the pledger budgets to calculate the maximum free rider potential.
I guarantee to always keep the project at the brink of abandonment to preserve the value of the pledges.
Hint: A rational pledger would consider these conditions amazing because all of them preserve their investment while protecting them from freeriders. 99% of the strategy here is to shift the freerider problem onto the pledger by guaranteeing that the project will be shut down, but this leaves the pledgers vulnerable to freeriders who analyse who is willing to fund the project to avoid funding it themselves.
Hint 2: You cannot fork your way out of this. At best you can have competing maintainers who underbid each other using ULTIMATUM.MD.