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by zanny
2596 days ago
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Many popular programs are now seeing continuous paid development by patronage including Godot, Krita, Blender, GIMP, and OBS. It is unsettling that they all get this success on a proprietary middle man that siphons a portion of the money in the form of Patreon, but the principle is absolutely applicable to development in general. Right now its regular people paying to have software they want to use developed - game engines, art tools, etc - but nothing should stop a culture shift from getting both corporations and private developers to start paying in a similar way for libraries and infrastructure given the means to correlate the added value in doing so. |
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Godot=$10k/month (patreon) Krita=$2k/month (their donation page) Blender=€31k/month (their fund page) GIMP=individual donations only for two developers, $1k/month and $595/month each OBS=$3.5k/month from opencollective, $1.5k/month for the lead developer for patreon
Now, i do not know what sort of standards you have, but to me considering the amount of effort needed to create the software you mentioned these sound like pittance with the exception of OBS (and even then the developer would get a lot more money if he worked as a developer on a regular company... in some places even as a junior).
$10k/month for a game engine of the complexity of Godot? For Unity that would be absolute failure even back when the editor was available only on Mac OS X.
$2k/month for an advanced complex image editor and painting application? Even in the 80s (and ignoring inflation) that would be a cause to close shop for any software development company.
Blender needs to reach €50k/month to hire 10 developers full time? I'm curious what part of that €5k/month actually goes to the developer.
I'm not going to comment on GIMP, it should be obvious how ridiculous those numbers are.
Look, these numbers are actually the proof of how bad the economic side of FLOSS development is. These are jokes compared to even a small startup, let alone projects that exist years for software used by hundreds of thousands (if not millions, for some).
Developers who work on those aren't doing it for the money, they are doing it because they love the work. If you want to monetize your work, FLOSS is not the way to go, especially as an independent individual.