[xiaodai]

Free software is difficult. I have a family and young kids to feed. I can't work for FREE. I have open-source packages that are "free", but that's my hobby or a living. If you get a professorship at a university then you can flog free software, but it doesn't work for the other 99.99999% of the population. Sigh. I wish open-soure software is funded like universities. European Union funds some software, but more should be done. The economy of free software is a classific economics problems; too many free loaders. We can't continue to rely on volunteers. The public needs to fund open-source software, just like how to we fund universities!

[simion314]

> 99.999%

the numbers are not that bad, consider someone asks me to write them a tool for them to manage their electronic store inventory, tasks etc. I am the developer the shop is the client, I get paid and they get the programs and the source code. This is what it should be and not land int he situation where you get a change later and you don't have the source code.

Or someone hires me to write a program to apply a filter for an image, this program will run on my client server , because it runs on a server only my client will have the source and because the users won't run it on the browsers I do not need to send them a copy of the source.

Anyway there are more jobs where you are paid to write software and the client also gets the source and does whatever he wants with the code, as long as all users that run the program can get a copy of the source then it is free software. you don't have to make the code public on Github

[raxxorrax]

I devop proprietary software for proprietary hardware and still couldn't do much without people advocating free or at least open software and can acknowledge the importance. I try to give that back, even if that is only through teaching juniors.

[gnode]

Something I wonder is whether productized software needs to exist as an industry in its own right. Maybe it is enough for software to be incidentally produced in the course of other industries. The Linux kernel is today developed mostly by those with a commercial interest in using and supporting it, such as Intel, Google, Samsung and IBM. LLVM is supported largely by Apple; Go by Google; React by Facebook.

Comparatively, science and mathematics, which software is arguably conceptually closer to, haven't ended as human endeavours for want of direct commercial exploitation.

[syshum]

There are plenty of people that work on OpenSource at corporations.

Linux Kernel is a widely known example, but not the only one.

Further, there are funding models that do not require "donations" to fund libre software, "Free" does not mean free in cost, it means freedom.

Some options include

1. Paid Binary Dististrbution

2. Support Agreements

3. Priority Features

4. Customization

5. Hosting / SaaS

6. Paid documentation access

7. Donations / Tips

8. Normal Invoicing (most people forget You can invoice a company for GPL software, nothing prevents it. This is often good for Bean Counters)

There are others as well

[soohyung]

Open source software isn't necessarily free software.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

[UserIsUnused]

Yes, but that is unrelated to his post, in fact he said precisely that the "free" is about freedom.

[TheDong]

Many people get paid to write free software. Some people write free software and sell it (for example, some paid android and iphone apps have their code available under the GPL, but still make money).

There are many companies, including facebook/google/etc, that employ kernel developers who primarily write free software. There are companies that follow the opencore model, and many of their developers only work on the open portion (e.g. elasticsearch, mongodb, nginx, etc). There are some people who offer consulting for their free software and make good money by that. There are some companies where almost all development is free software, and money is gotten through other means (e.g. mozilla, redhat).

Free software does not have to mean working for free. It doesn't even mean you can't charge money for it (free as in libre, not free as in beer).

That being said, I agree that funding free software development is a large problem. Right now, the most sustainable model is a company to be interested in a project and to pay developers to work on it (e.g. linux), or for a company to own the project (e.g. firefox, mongodb).

There's no great funding story I know of for open source projects that are important, but maintained by people on the side (e.g. most of gnu coreutils, random libraries big projects depend on, etc).

However, your comment sounds more grim than reality is, and also conflates free as in libre with free as in beer.

Yeah, sure, you can't work for free, but that doesn't mean you can't make free software and charge people for it.

[thelazydogsback]

> There are many companies, including facebook/google/etc, that employ kernel developers who primarily write free software

We pay eventually -- in this case the "free" software is paid for with a loss of freedom elsewhere, in this case by giving up your private information and fulfilling our role as as "consumers" using their code.

There are many that would rather actually pay in a transparent fashion.

[mda]

No good deed goes unpunished eh.