[quectophoton]

I'm all for developers getting paid, but the thing with monetizing an open source project is:

If someone pays for your project, does the money belong exclusively to you as the project creator?

If the answer is "yes", you're literally making money off the effort of others without compensating them[1]; if the answer is "no":

* How do you decide how much should go to everyone else?

* Do you pay some percentage of what you earn to your dependencies? Only direct dependencies? When do you stop considering something a dependency (e.g. if you use a Linux distribution, do you donate to their maintainers as well)?

* Do you pay maintainers of your project?

* If you're not working actively in the project, but some devs are maintaining it, do you still get paid as the author? Or does "your share" go entirely to the maintainers?

* If some dev contributes one time, but it turns out to be a real important feature that becomes "core" because of how useful it turns out to be, do you pay them? Only once, or some part of your earnings?

* If someone forks your project, and you merge code from that fork, do you pay the author of the fork?

I'm not arguing for or against either position. I do what keeps my conscience clean.

I'm just trying to raise some questions that always come to my mind when the author of an open source project tries to get donations, or when they complain about others profiting off their project without donating anything[2].

[1] [2]: Notice the similarity between these two situations.

[imtringued]

You are assuming that the "creator" of the project has not contributed a significant part of the code base. If the commercialisation scares away developers that might be sad but that may not matter in the long run because core developers usually contribute the vast majority of the code. Drive by commits/pull requests could be still worth it, because it is the responsibility of the core team to carry the maintenance burden of your patch, so depending on how valuable you consider the time spent on your patch and how valuable you consider avoiding the burden of maintaining a fork, you may decide to simply donate your patch. If you wanted to be a significant contributor with no expectation of compensation, then this arrangement is suboptimal but if you insisted, nothing stops you from forking the project and taking it the direction you want.

A big problem with capitalism and economics is that all of it is seen through rose tinted glasses. In the mathematical models, everything you have said is perfectly accounted for, every single commit gets properly compensated down to the cent and even the companies pay exactly as much money as it costs the developers to maintain the software to the necessary standard.