Re: Obligation to maintain?
> We now seem to be in a situation where even that source of income has been eliminated, not by any particular law or campaign, but simply by developers capitulating to peer pressure. And having done that, they're of course finding themselves expected to serve up not only support, but also functional enhancements they don't themselves need, free of charge.
The problem with "If you want it, pay for it," is that if you pay for it, everyone else benefits. (That's a good thing in my book.) However, people that put in the resources of paying for something generally feel slighted if everyone else gets that thing too. For commercial software, you can pay a moderate sum for the software, and put in feature requests -- or push real hard for something, and get it if enough other users are likely to want it. For example, MS office, upgraded standards in web browsers, 10-bit color depth... no one user will pay for these things, probably. However that's been the general paid-support option of open source. Commercial software has been socialized: among the users, all pay a bit, all get the features of the software. Open source is one-for-all: one person pays, everyone gets it. (Barring few large projects like Redhat and Ubuntu, where you can put in bug requests, vote for them, .... it's commercial software that is open-source.)
If getting paid for your work (as an open source developer) is the solution to much of this, we have a problem of figuring out how to actually achieve the socialized aspect of this. Users who don't have to pay, or don't care enough to pay for support (a subscription, if not purchasing features), won't. Someone who needs something is left paying for the whole thing, for anyone who wants to use it. No one is going to subscribe to 73 open-source subscriptions that they use, of typically not a low cost (which a subscription can't be, given credit card rates). What are the alternatives?
- Bug bounties -- for contributors to win? Feature bounties? (who places the bounty? Do they pay the whole bounty?)
- Shared investment pools -- for feature development? If you want this feature, invest in this pool. However it may be years before others even find out about the pool to invest, or before they need the feature, and by then maybe the original investor(s) will have withdrawn their support
- feature pricing? How does the developer decide how much a feature will cost, to either set the price of the pool, and what if they price the feature wrong? Who is collecting the pool, is it the developer, and if the dev changes the pool price can anyone ask for a refund?
Yuck.
Perhaps someone will create an open-source "projects" non-profit site, with investments, feature requests, investment pools, and etc. Maybe it's happened already, maybe it's still alive or maybe it died. It seems a little like micro-transactions from (was it Brave?). I don't think those ever really took off.