[BrightGlow]

In my opinion, that article is pretty insubstantial and is mostly just responding to the same 4chan trolling mentioned in this wiki. It's just not a productive line of discussion and doesn't make any sense in the actual context of how open source works. But I'll answer your question anyway.

I think there are a few GNOME developers that have patreons or some other crowdfunding/bounty thing but it's not a major source of income for most. Getting $2 a month from a handful of people is not enough to fund a developer for any serious work. If you want to fund someone for real then you should probably pay a real developer salary which would be at least $75k-$100k a year in the US, and more if you want them to have competitive benefits. The price could be different in other countries. You might be able to hire one of the Linux consultancies to do it for the equivalent hourly rate. This is of course if you work for a company that can afford that. If you're a normal non-rich person then you're probably out of luck here, sorry. Software is expensive.

I also would be wary of anyone who guarantees they can get something into the master branch. To me that's scammer talk. Getting patches merged is an ongoing conversation between the developers and maintainers, you don't want someone who's just pushing code through without any checks. And if they're saying they can get something through before any code is even written and before anyone even knows if the solution is viable or not, then I would view that with extreme skepticism. If it's a major feature then it may end up taking months or years for it to get reviewed and merged, or it may just sit around for years and not get merged at all because it causes issues in some other part of the code, or it could end up being obsoleted by something else before then, or it could just end up being low priority and nobody gets around to it... or any number of other things really.

Hopefully that clears up some of those bizarre statements that are in that article.

[_dain_]

>In my opinion, that article is pretty insubstantial and is mostly just responding to the same 4chan trolling mentioned in this wiki. It's just not a productive line of discussion and doesn't make any sense in the actual context of how open source works.

How on Earth is it "trolling"? Seriously, I want you to explain to me how that article is bad-faith in any way. Yes, it's written in a absurd, ironic way -- that's because the situation it's describing is absurd. When such a massive, obvious usability flaw has gone unfixed for so long, people have the perfect right to joke about it and make fun of GNOME. Sorry if you think that's unfair trolling -- it isn't.

And lol at the goalpost moving

>gnome is underfunded

>okay, how much money to fix the file chooser

>oh well uhh that's now how it works and you couldn't afford it anyway

[BrightGlow]

Sorry, I don't mean the article is trolling or bad-faith. What I mean is that the author seems to have been trolled and the article is only responding to that trolling. That's just my guess after seeing this 4chan wiki and after seeing some very hostile statements made about this over the years. The discourse is being driven by trolls. The questions asked here aren't "bad" per se but if there had been any communication with the real developers at all then I wouldn't expect anyone to ask these questions, they don't make any sense in context. It seems to me the only reason they're being asked is because trolls spread misinformation about the project. Please try to avoid falling into the same trap, I'm noticing that you're doing it and it's not helpful. Don't let the trolls win.

I'll go a step further and say: I don't think your assessment is correct. There isn't anything absurd about an open source project missing a popular feature, it's a completely normal situation. Most open source projects are underfunded and understaffed and seem to have a giant "wishlist" of unimplemented features. Also, please avoid making hostile jokes or mocking people, that's more of that cruelty-focused 4chan-style discourse that is against the rules here. It's not an interesting discussion. When you drift into that unproductive stuff that's just being cruel to other people, I would say that absolutely is unfair trolling, so please don't do that. A more productive discussion might be something like: we discuss ways to fund the project, we discuss ways to get bugs fixed, we discuss technical advancements that could help speed things along. Does that make sense? I'm happy to discuss that stuff with you further.

>And lol at the goalpost moving

This again is what I mean, please don't dismiss my comments like this, it's really hostile. I gave you an answer for what it costs, and I also explained why that's not really a good question to ask. If you want me to clarify something then just ask, I could also suggest some better questions to ask if you really do want to help open source developers.