Per hour would seem "do we need to pay this? We don't really need support do we? We could just buy it if and when we need it"
You're talking fair while I'm talking about the only legitimate way I can pay you for your time as an open source dev.
It would be nice if I could have my client retroactively pay you for your dev time in full but I like working with the client and don't fancy being laughed out of the room
In case you missed the subtext I rarely if ever actually use the support, I can just justify it to bigcorp's beancounters. Chances are you already provide the support for free in Issues anyway but I have a way to pay. I just want people paid at all mate. We can work on fair later
This sounds like your problem and the world you are in. In my world I work for a company that offered a well paid devs months salary to get a bug fixed in OSS. They didn’t have the time soon enough so we ended up fixing it ourselves and doing a PR.
An OSS developer who wants to be paid needs to think like a business. They are more a business that happens to OSS. That would preclude certain OSS products while making others more viable. It is good to strategic. Best for most is to find a company to pay a salary for them to maintain it.
"addressed" may be different from "resolved", and the more people are paying money for things, the more they will want 'resolved' to be in the direction they want. they will be less happy to have their 'resolution' be 'wontfix', even if that technically is 'addressing' the support request.
That's true, and because of that reason I am wondering whether it's possible to make people pay for having their issues addressed rather than resolved. The triaging/addressing process is where many people feel like open-source work is thankless, and throwing money in the mix can help make it feel more fair.
Maybe people will be willing to pay if the cost was lower? Maybe when you file a ticket, you can include a $10 fee to make sure it gets 10 minutes of the developer's time. (Or maybe you can attach $10 to any ticket, not just yours.)
To reduce the kinds of disputes that come up, there would be no guaranteed result other than that the developer spends 10 minutes doing their best to address the ticket and that they leave a reply. If people feel like the devs are just wasting their 10 minutes, they can simply not pay next time.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think this is a good idea, even just for the sake of optics: simply having the "paid ticket" there, even if no one uses it, might make people more thankful of the non-paid tickets the devs are addressing. And it offers a great retort/actionable step for those who complain that tickets aren't being addressed.
This idea pops up every month. It really needs to find the UVP. What's going wrong that it never takes off? What's the blocker? What are the buyers missing? What are the suppliers not getting (beside money)?
Don't be clever about it, don't be per request about it, just give me a number and an invoice.