[alphazard]

It's crazy to me that open source maintainers offer free support to corporations or governments that they could easily extract money from for the benefit of the project or themselves.

An individual wants a feature and is prepared to pitch in, probably worth the time investment for a maintainer.

The US government wants floating point arithmetic done a certain way, fuck you, pay me.

[subjectsigma]

I work for a government contractor with military sponsors. I agree with this 100%; the government should pay people to work on FLOSS code. Not only because I might get paid more, but because I strongly believe that classification and bureaucracy are tools to hide incompetence, and also that as (much as possible) public money taken from everyone should produce public code that benefits everyone. It’s really a win for everyone doing the right thing.

[loa_in_]

FOSS users don't usually advertise their line of work and what they are going to do with the software.

That, and also, there's a donation link in many of the repos. Why isn't it used as much as it ought to be?

[tgamblin]

It's disappointing that this response linked by OP was posted at all. And even more disappointing because context gets lost every time it shows up on HN.

The linked email is from an HPE/Cray employee interacting with the upstream gcc team, not from anyone in the U.S. government.

The U.S. Government, via lots of programs, national labs, etc. does pay people (and companies) to work on open source code. This has at various points included LLVM, clang, flang, gcc, and many other projects. We like it when things get upstreamed and we also contribute ourselves to these projects.

Certain companies' willingness to put in the work required to upstream has been an issue at times, but it is improving and it's something that we push on very hard.