[easytiger]

Can't disagree more. That completely misunderstands the motivating philosophy behind effort expenditure given to FLOSS.

It isn't about motivating people to do things; that creates abandonware. It is about solving a problem that needs solving.

[afarrell]

I'm confused by this. How does contributing money to people developing software for the commons lead to abandonware? And is abandonware a problem if it is free/open-source? Should I avoid publishing my hobby projects that I'm not planning to support?

[ams6110]

It encourages people to start up projects just to get the contributions, then abandon the projects when the initial stream of contributions dries up. Yeah abandonware is a problem for people who start to use it thinking there is a community of some sort behind it, and then are stuck with supporting it all on their own or having to find something else. Fortunately such projects are normally easy to spot once you've been burned a few times. Unfortunately they comprise 95% of what's on github.