| 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. |