> This "it's free so you get what you paid for, and if it's shit don't complain because it was free" really rubs me the wrong way. It's a very capitalist mindset that measures everything in money.
I mean like... yeah.
If I'm maintaining an open source project as a side gig or for fun, I might be able to review and merge some patches. But if the corporations that use my project submit a busload of PRs (or worse, just issues with no solutions) and I end up spending so much time on them that I have no time to work on my dayjob and make rent... that's not gonna work.
Now if those corporations each chuck a hundred bucks a month (less than the cost of a single Developer's Enterprise MSDN subscription) my way, then sure! I'll scale back my freelance web dev work and spend half my workweek dedicated to maintaining this project!
So yeah, I think the corporations who make money off open source projects should be kicking back a bit of money to those projects if they want an expectation of reliability. It doesn't have to be a ton of money either:
- If we're talking about a tiny header parsing library that needs occasional security patches, maybe expense a few bucks at the maintainer's Patreon so they can spend 10 hours a year on those patches.
- If we're talking about the web framework that underlies your big newspaper's CMS, maybe have a developer spend 20 hours a month pushing well made PRs to fix the problems you care about.
- If we're talking about an OS like Debian and you're AWS, maybe hire a 3 person team to work solely on keeping it secure.
What rubs me the wrong way is the notion that if it's for free it has no worth. This "free == shit" idea that is expressed in "you can use it but don't expect much of it because it's free". Maybe I'm just too much of an old school open source idealist.
I mean like... yeah.
If I'm maintaining an open source project as a side gig or for fun, I might be able to review and merge some patches. But if the corporations that use my project submit a busload of PRs (or worse, just issues with no solutions) and I end up spending so much time on them that I have no time to work on my dayjob and make rent... that's not gonna work.
Now if those corporations each chuck a hundred bucks a month (less than the cost of a single Developer's Enterprise MSDN subscription) my way, then sure! I'll scale back my freelance web dev work and spend half my workweek dedicated to maintaining this project!
So yeah, I think the corporations who make money off open source projects should be kicking back a bit of money to those projects if they want an expectation of reliability. It doesn't have to be a ton of money either:
- If we're talking about a tiny header parsing library that needs occasional security patches, maybe expense a few bucks at the maintainer's Patreon so they can spend 10 hours a year on those patches.
- If we're talking about the web framework that underlies your big newspaper's CMS, maybe have a developer spend 20 hours a month pushing well made PRs to fix the problems you care about.
- If we're talking about an OS like Debian and you're AWS, maybe hire a 3 person team to work solely on keeping it secure.