Consider a team of people building a house. They have all sorts of things that need focus and work - planning the build, assembling resources, coordinating specialists and doing the actual construction.
Now, add a second team who don't understand anything about what the first team is doing, who the first team have to talk to every time they want to buy a pencil or screw.
How it is that anyone thinks this is a good way to do business is completely beyond me, and yet we have entire schools devoted to training people to do this.
You have to admit, most open source projects suffer from a lack of funding. I don't like this particular solution but something like it could work. It's supposed to be opt-in for project owners, and that's ok as far as I'm concerned.
As far as the forking issue, nothing really stops zero-effort forks from seeking compensation. Anyone could fork a project and replace all the donation links in the docs with their own. So if you do want to donate to a project, do a little research.
Financialization is why nice things can be done at scale. Without finanialization the nice things would be smaller and less common. Expecting people to do high quality work for free is not sustainable.
Profit motives don't create quality. Passion and pride create quality. Unfortunately, passion and pride are unreliable, and products and services that rely on them are inconsistent. Profit motives create consistency, but produce products and services that are adequate at best.
So then, reserve profit motives for things that need to be done, and for which you can tolerate mere adequacy. I want my garbageman to be motivated by profit, because society would collapse in a week without garbage collection. For things that need to be done well, there's no alternative other than finding someone who actually gives a shit regardless of the profit involved (which isn't to say that they must live in poverty, but rather that profit must be a secondary motivation rather than a primary one; find someone who wants to be doing the work even if they weren't getting paid).
On the margin, there may be many people working in, for example, finance who would make highly valuable contributions to open source projects if they were financially incentivized.
What is effectively being argued here is that we should oppose grass roots subsidy of important public work just because there was a specific incentive issue in a specific initiative. The code doesn't care why you wrote it. Maybe some bad code gets subsidized. That's ok - don't use it.
Consider a team of people building a house. They have all sorts of things that need focus and work - planning the build, assembling resources, coordinating specialists and doing the actual construction.
Now, add a second team who don't understand anything about what the first team is doing, who the first team have to talk to every time they want to buy a pencil or screw.
How it is that anyone thinks this is a good way to do business is completely beyond me, and yet we have entire schools devoted to training people to do this.