[Thorrez]

If I'm choosing between 2 products on the market, if I pay for the higher quality product, that's going to increase that company's revenue. That will either allow them to pay the existing engineers more, or hire more engineers. The lower quality product won't get my revenue, and thus won't be able to do that.

More revenue -> company grows

Less revenue -> company shrinks

[OutOfHere]

Open source software has no revenue at all, yet it often is superior in many ways.

[Thorrez]

That's a different situation from what this conversation was about. The conversation was about if there are 2 for-profit products, one costing 20% more than the other, would paying for the more expensive one provide money to engineers or not.

Regarding the new conversation topic: some open source software does have revenue. Forms of revenue include: donations, selling support, selling licenses that are less restrictive than the original open source license, ads, and selling addons. Yes, revenue for open source software is generally less than for-profit software, and despite that the open source software is often higher quality. I didn't claim that a higher quality product will always have more revenue than a lower quality product. I just made a claim about where the money goes.

[OutOfHere]

I think we're getting somewhere now. The solution could be to fund the developers of open source software, actively paying them to implement the desired features that otherwise don't get picked up (while maintaining good quality and their continued ownership over the software). Micromanaging them as employees wouldn't work.

[bruce511]

I agree with your idea. I'm working in Open Source. How much money can you send me please?

The above statement of course raises more questions than answers;

A) you believe Open Source should be funded. Are you willing to be a funder?

B) do you believe me when I say I write Open Source? (You shouldn't, I don't)

C) since you won't be managing this project, can I assume you'll just hope the feature you want will materialze at some point? In the form you are hoping for?

D) will you fund "any" Open Source, or only the OSS you are using? Or want changed?

[brazukadev]

it is the same conversation: quality software. Revenue/pricing are NOT the main signals of software quality at all.