[aadhavans]

A very well-written piece. The section on funding open source is as relevant as it's ever been, and I don't think we've learnt much since last year.

As the proportion of younger engineers contributing to open-source decreases (a reasonable choice, given the state of the economy), I see only two future possibilities:

1. Big corporations take ownership of key open-source libraries in an effort to continue their development.

2. Said key open-source libraries die, and corporations develop proprietary replacements for their own use. The open source scene remains alive, but with a much smaller influence.

[bluGill]

Unfortunately I have no clue how to get a company to put money into the open source we use. Not just my current company, but any company. I've sometimes been able to get permission to contribute something I build on company time, but often what I really want is someone on the project to spend a year or two maintaining it. Do the boring effort of creating a release. Write that complex feature everyone (including me) wants.

In decades past companies you to pay for my license for Visual Studio (I think of a MSDN subscription), clear case, a dozen different issue/work trackers. However as soon as an open source alternative is used I don't know how to get the money that would have been spent to them.

Come to think of it I'm maintainer of a couple open source projects that I don't use anymore and I don't normally bother even looking at the project either. Either someone needs to pay me to continue maintaining it (remember I don't find them useful myself so I'm not doing it to scratch an itch), or someone needs to take them over from me - but given xz attacks I'm no longer sure how to hand maintenance over.

[johngossman]

In my prior career I talked to many companies about open source usage. If you tell them they are running an unsupported database or operating system in production, they will often see the value of buying support. But it is much harder to get them to pay for non-production stuff, especially development tools. And even if you find an enlightened manager, getting budget to pay a maintainer for a project is very difficult to even explain.

“We’re paying for contract development? But it’s not one of our products and we’ll have no rights to the software? They’ll fix all the bugs we find, right? Right?” This a hard conversation at most companies, even tech companies.

[ghaff]

Development tools was almost always a tough standalone business even before open source became so prevalent.

[akoboldfrying]

"They’ll fix all the bugs we find, right?" -- that sounds to me like a reasonable requirement on the maintainer, if they are going to be paid a non negligible amount.

[ndiddy]

At companies where I've worked, all of the money we've put into open source has been in contracting the developer(s) to add a feature we needed to the upstream version. Of course, this means that we didn't really fund ongoing maintenance on anything we used that had all the features we needed.

[RossBencina]

As an independent maintainer I don't really know where to start trying to organise an ongoing income stream from users to support maintenance.

I thought that the idea of a funding manifest to advertise funding requests was a good idea: https://floss.fund/funding-manifest/ No idea if it works.

[bluGill]

Most open source projects don't really need an income stream. It only becomes an issue when the project is large enough that there is desire for someone to work on it half time or more. Smaller projects can still be done as a hobbyist thing. (the project I "maintain" only needs a few hours of my time per year, but since I no longer use it I can't be bothered - there is a problem for those who still use it). Of course it is hard to say - curl seems like it should be a small project but in fact it is large enough to support someone full time.

[throw83848484]

Sadly, as OS dev, I see third way: development behind closed doors.

With AI and CV reference hunting, number of contributions is higher than ever. Open-source projects are basically spammed, with low quality contributions.

Public page is just a liability. I am considering to close public bugzilla, git repo and discussions. I would just take bug reports and patches from very small circle of customers and power users. Everything except release source tarball, and short changelog would be private!

Open-source means you get a source code, not free customer and dev support!

[pabs3]

The FOSSjobs wiki has a bunch of resources on this topic:

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

[lrvick]

My company, Distrust, exists to produce, support, and fund our open source security tools.

So far our core full time team of 3 gets to spend about half our time consulting/auditing and half our time contributing to our open projects that most of our clients use and depend on.

The key is for companies to have visibility into the current funding status of the software they depend on, and relationships with maintainers, so they can offer to fund features or fixes they need instead of being blocked.

https://distrust.co

[ozim]

I think big corporations will take ownership - well not directly but via paying to foundations and it already is the case.

Second thing is there are bunch of things corporations need to use but don't want to develop on their own like SSH.

There is already too much internal tooling inside of big corporations that is rotting there and a lot of times it would be much better if they give it out to a foundation - like Apache foundation where projects go to die or limp through.