FWIW I’m donating every month to CodeMirror author, donates to Vim, etc. I’m not saying they are wrong, nor right, solely that implying (but maybe I misunderstood the comment) that somehow open-source and getting paid are antagonist is IMHO damaging to FLOSS broadly.
That’s a fair point. Still, I think it’s also worth acknowledging that getting paid to develop open-source software can often be more difficult than getting paid for proprietary work. According to Tidelift State of Open Source Maintainer report, 44 % of FOSS maintainers aren’t getting paid for their work but would like to. Interestingly, 36 % of FOSS maintainers are getting some monetary compensation.¹
(I’m responding mostly because I found that survey. Interesting numbers.)
¹ I thought this number would be smaller. Alas, I am a pessimist.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. That number is of course way too high. I won’t point fingers but… OK I will, I would argue, naively, that a lot of that frustration comes from corporate exploitation. I bet a lot of that comes from maintainer who noticed big number of downloads on CDN but no PR because somehow a paid for tool (so not blaming just BigTech here) relies on their work… and they don’t see a cent for it.
I doubt most people who have a quirky side project, say something about how to use Lego controllers for their model train on the weekends with kids, really mind. Sure they’d love to see a bit of money from it but whatever.
Anyway I’ll dig into that report a bit more, thanks for sharing!
FWIW I’m donating every month to CodeMirror author, donates to Vim, etc. I’m not saying they are wrong, nor right, solely that implying (but maybe I misunderstood the comment) that somehow open-source and getting paid are antagonist is IMHO damaging to FLOSS broadly.
That’s a fair point. Still, I think it’s also worth acknowledging that getting paid to develop open-source software can often be more difficult than getting paid for proprietary work. According to Tidelift State of Open Source Maintainer report, 44 % of FOSS maintainers aren’t getting paid for their work but would like to. Interestingly, 36 % of FOSS maintainers are getting some monetary compensation.¹
(I’m responding mostly because I found that survey. Interesting numbers.)
¹ I thought this number would be smaller. Alas, I am a pessimist.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. That number is of course way too high. I won’t point fingers but… OK I will, I would argue, naively, that a lot of that frustration comes from corporate exploitation. I bet a lot of that comes from maintainer who noticed big number of downloads on CDN but no PR because somehow a paid for tool (so not blaming just BigTech here) relies on their work… and they don’t see a cent for it.
I doubt most people who have a quirky side project, say something about how to use Lego controllers for their model train on the weekends with kids, really mind. Sure they’d love to see a bit of money from it but whatever.
Anyway I’ll dig into that report a bit more, thanks for sharing!