Same here. As a result, the vast majority of my programming effort goes into my day job, and my OSS projects are critically understaffed.
Which works okay for me and my projects, but if I wanted them to be serious players in the market rather than just side projects, I would need to find a way to earn money in a way which doesn't eat most of my time.
Personally, I want FOSS software to be able to be serious players in the market. Therefore, I want them to have enough developer resources to make that possible. Therefore, they need to make money.
> Personally, I want FOSS software to be able to be serious players in the market. Therefore, I want them to have enough developer resources to make that possible. Therefore, they need to make money.
I agree. I do not see anything wrong with earning money from open source software, lots of companies do it. Open source is always good for transparency than proprietary closed software. We should support open source devs to be successful, as you said, to go against proprietary monopolies.
I agree, you don't owe me anything. You don't have to share your code for free.
My point is that if you want to make money for your code, either get a job writing software or create a business around the software you wrote.
I think open source should be created by people not trying to make money from it. I understand that not everyone feels this way, and I sometimes agree with the arguments. However, my overall feeling is that supporting open source work should come in the form of companies supporting their employees to work on open source work that is valuable for the company employing those people. They contribute to open source not because they are trying to make money from that work, but because they use that software to support their main money making work, and get more value by sharing the work than keeping it fully internal.
And so your software will be poisoned by value extraction from the user, which will be inferior to software from someone not wanting to make money, which I'll use instead. :D
Working on this suite of apps might be his day job. If he takes up a day job he might not be able to work on and maintain these many apps.
Can you develop and maintain a suite of 8-10 apps only on your free time? I was talking about how this specific developer who makes these many apps can make money, and not how you do.
Which works okay for me and my projects, but if I wanted them to be serious players in the market rather than just side projects, I would need to find a way to earn money in a way which doesn't eat most of my time.
Personally, I want FOSS software to be able to be serious players in the market. Therefore, I want them to have enough developer resources to make that possible. Therefore, they need to make money.