Research study summarized by IT’S FOSS. Why open source developers burn out and what needs to change.
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Community leaders must encourage better behavior, and platforms like GitHub should educate users about the humans behind the code.
Not surprised to see this as a recommendation. So many entitled a*hole users.
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Pay OSS developers reliably. Not donations or tips. Predictable income through decentralized funding that preserves maintainer autonomy. Foster recognition and respect too.
The kicker here is funding. Decentralized funding, while a good thought, probably won’t happen without benefactors that REALLY care about this space but don’t care about where their money is going to. The way these projects usually are supported are through nonprofit sponsorship, corporate sponsorship, or a significant donation. Otherwise, a lot of developers are self-funded or have a day job supporting them.
After all, billionaires like Jack Dorsey and Vitalik Buterin donate to FOSS projects all the time. It’s surprisingly common to have your project not generate any funding until a mysterious benefactor donates thousands of dollars worth in crypto (see Accrescent).
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Nothing new.
But nobody found a nice solution so far.
Or at least, the obvious decision (big tech companies paying 0.0001% back to maintainers) is still not a priority to them. 
Most people I do know are exactly in this situation.
Few exceptions are sustainable.
Sad reality but yeah, AI does not help it either…
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Sincerely asking for informed input here…obviously, money is just one of the factors, but what funding models have proven to be most successful and sustainable so far? Has anyone done some creative or innovative thinking about improving FOSS development in general? From what I’ve seen it appears that a free base product with a recurring fee for extra features makes the most sense, but I’m curious if there are better pathways.
With all these independent developers, would it not be possible to create or join a consortium or team up together for best practices, support, resourcing, etc? And what about grants or some kind of government incentive for people or organizations or institutions with lots of $ to support FOSS software? I’m not sure what the answer is, but I’m guessing some people in this forum might know.
I’m not suggesting there are easy solutions, and I recognize much of the problem lies with entitled users who don’t contribute in meaningful ways. Thoughts?
I use a lot of FOSS. I struggle with the fact that I am honestly ignorant of every little package and dependency on my system and on services I use every day. Unfortunately, I doubt most users have time to investigate these things even if they want to. Most people likely end up just donating to whoever shoves a donation button/banner in their face, like Signal and Wikipedia, because it’s easy.
I would find it incredibly helpful if there were a tool where I could enter every program and OS I use and it automatically spit out information about whether the developers are seeking donations, a link to their donation platform of choice, and crucially, similar information about the dependencies of the software that is visible to me. Even better if I could use said tool to divvy up whatever money I have available and send it to those projects automatically. This is probably a difficult task though, or else someone would have already done it.
Long term, governments need to tax the companies and billionaires exploiting these FOSS developers far more heavily and redistribute that wealth, because big tech is clearly not interested in doing that, even when they make billions off said devs.
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The goverment should donate more to FOSS
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