[gorjusborg]

I want to agree, and I understand the position, but there's no room for nuance when you throw around the work 'always'.

I think I disagree that it is always good.

For instance, if a company is paying someone to work on open source, and they use that to leverage the project in a direction that is against its other users' best interest, can that be good? I don't think so.

There are numerous examples of situations and behaviors you could come up with that are not 'good'.

I'm all for people making a living, but I don't like bad behavior, no matter if it generates 'freeish' source code or not.

[jszymborski]

I think the article addresses this.

It's a matter of not letting "perfect" get in the way of "good". You're totally right, we should work towards getting everyone who wants to work on open source code bases the public funds they deserve at every opportunity, but in the mean time, we'll have to put up with corpos funding some of the FLOSS code.

> We have to accept the world as it is – even if it’s not the world we want. This means we have to be okay with the idea that maintainers need to be paid. Far too often I see arguments like: “maintainers shouldn’t be paid by private companies because the government should be supporting them.” Sure, this sounds great – but governments aren’t doing this! So this argument reduces to “open source maintainers shouldn’t be paid”. I can’t get on board with that.

[philipwhiuk]

But some of these aren't good. Some of them are the opposite of good.

We are allowing lousy business models to survive by insisting they are better than nothing.

[zrn900]

That's why the open source communities themselves should be funding their own projects. Because if the communities and users dont fund their own projects, private corporations will fund them and they will have the say. Open Source must not become outsourced 'free labor' which major corporations can leech on. The best way to do it has been the 'freemium' format that is used in the Wordpress ecosystem and a few others - the open source shop creates and maintains a free version of their software under GPL2+, and sells downloads, update licenses & support for more advanced addons. The WP ecosystem was able to float itself with this method without taking in investor money or corporate money, and the software shops that exist in that ecosystem are able to pay their developers living wages. The entire ecosystem was created and is still floated by the open source software producers and the community members.

Basically, open source is like politics: Who funds it gets the say. And just like politics, we need to make sure that the communities are self-sustaining economically so that external money wont call the shots.

I know that a lot of us in open source software are very proud with our voluntary work and its contributions to open source. That is accurate and praise worthy.

But what do we do when we get up in the morning and go to work?

We each work in a private company that seeks to maximize its market share and gain more control of the economy, bar a minority of us who work in actual open source jobs. In one hand, we are giving something tangible to open source with our contributions, but the work that we have to do in our day job in a private corporation takes a lot of that away because the organized, concentrated impact of a large private organization with a lot of money goes much further than the heroic efforts of collectives of volunteers.

That is why open source must fund itself and become its own economic and political power. Otherwise we will always be giving with one hand with our contributions but involuntarily taking back with the other hand because of the work we have to do in private corporations. And this is without mentioning that if we dont fund & float our own ecosystems and become a collective economic and political power as a community in our own right, we will always be rule-takers and will always have to fight the attempts of the private lobbies at destroying open source.

Basically we must create our own world. And in that world, we must be able to work in, make money with, and live with open source.

[smburdick]

This is why grants are really important. That usually means deliverables in a specific timeframe. To me, that elevates open source from a full-time hobby to a job.

[jraph]

Grants are great but are often not nearly enough and they can vanish from a year to another. You'd better secure other sources of income. Grants will also usually fund specific features of your product but not the whole thing.

Other kinds of income are also good ways to fund open source like service, consultancy, support and even paid open source apps (which works particularly well for apps that have enterprise oriented features, turns out it doesn't matter that the source code is available under a free software license if it's convenient enough to click and buy).

Coincidentally, this is how I get paid :-)

Still, grants should not be ignored indeed.

[thfuran]

>can that be good? I don't think so

Well that's just an implied always. Is it likely good? No, probably not. Is it always bad? No, probably not. It's conceivable that there are a lot more potential users in the direction the company wants to drag the project, and the few current users can fork it.