donuts

I'm not saying I think it's wrong, I am just curious how and why people believe that FOSS development should be funded.

Why FOSS development should be funded is the easy part... At scale, FOSS maintainership and development often becomes a full-time job, just like any full-time software development job.

Users file bug reports of varying degrees of urgency. Community contributors submit merge requests (patches) that need to be tested, reviewed, iterated upon, and merged. Changes need to be documented and releases need to be made and delivered to users all over the world. Finally, for projects to improve, a future direction for the program needs to be planned and features need to be designed so that the project isn't just aimlessly stagnating. That's why people are paid full-time salaries to work on projects like Linux or Blender, because otherwise it is almost impossible for FOSS projects to handle a large number of users and contributors. (There are exceptions to this, but keep in mind that they are exceptions)

Lots of volunteer contributors obviously do good work for FOSS projects for free out of pure generosity and wanting to make things better. I appreciate that and I think we should all appreciate that. But unless they are independently wealthy, they are very unlikely to have the time to commit to spending 32 hours or more per week on contributing to FOSS. In our current world, most people have to make a living and they spend most of their time doing just that. They might have enough free time and energy to write a one-off feature/bug patch to some FOSS project, and that's a great and noble thing, but they likely do not have infinite time to continually maintain or develop a large project.

How FOSS projects get funded is the tricky part, because FOSS funding mainly relies on corporate support (as in Red Hat paying developers to maintain and work on the Fedora Project, for example) and individual user donations (like the ones that you might find on the Blender Development Fund, for example). Sadly many users don't value FOSS, as can be seen in this thread, and so they may never see the need to contribute to FOSS development funding.

I don't understand the idea that people should be paid for FOSS work.

In an ideal world, nobody would need money for anything (food, water, shelter, education, healthcare, infrastructure). We would all do exactly what we want, when we want, and society would just take care of itself.

In the slightly less than ideal world that we live in, everybody should be compensated for work that they do, and people who volunteer their extra time for free to some project or ideal should at the very least be appreciated.

title is saying FOSS is unsustainable but we are here decades later with Linux the dominant server platform (I was there when this was very much in doubt) and tons of our infrastructure continues to run on free and open software.

Much of which, including Linux, is funded by companies and individuals so that talented and knowledgeable developers can afford to spend the bulk of their weeks maintaining these projects. What would happen to if you dropped Linux's funding to $0/month? Obviously development and maintenance would no longer be sustainable.

Sadly not every project is as well-funded as Linux obviously, and there are important pieces of software at every level that are falling victim to the tragedy of the commons because, in some cases, FOSS development at scale is not sustainably funded.

I am willing to be convinced, but I can't help but think that software you get paid to write is a capitalist business, subject to all the enshittification problems that brings. Why do we want that in FOSS?

Paying people well to do good work is not the problem with capitalism. The root of the problems concerning capitalism is when the work of others is exploited in service to profit.

People who work full-time for non-profit organizations do get paid, as they should, and fairly.

Frankly we have our priorities totally fucking backwards if we are pointing the finger at workers or non-profits for the problems of society and the enshittification of technology. But that's something to think about as many of us collect our paychecks from our for-profit employers.

Unless you develop FOSS, in which case clearly random entitled bitches on the internet get to tell you what to do with your time and what it is worth, judging by these comments.

That wasn't an answer to my question.

What do you do for a living and why don't you do it for free?

Edit:

Nobody is forcing others to make free and open source software

But clearly a lot of people here are expecting people who develop and maintain open source software to do it for free, regardless of how many hours it takes and how obviously unsustainable that notion is at scale.

Nobody is claiming that FOSS is slavery (i.e. people being forced to work for free), but expecting other people to work for free is entitlement, plain and simple.

And yet the very entitled people in these comments have the nerve to tell other people that they should donate their time for the greater good, when you can be sure they gladly pick up a check every couple of weeks for whatever they do.

It's shameless. Remember that FOSS developers don't owe you shit.

Holy fuck. Nobody fucking wants this shit.

Edit: The minute AI generated trash music or videos start showing up in my feed I'm buying new drives for my jellyfin server and never looking back.

How many hours per week do you spend working on your own project for free?

How many bug reports and merge requests do you get per day?

I promise you that the way you work on your own project does not scale to the level of big FOSS projects with tens or hundreds of thousands of users or more.

ITT: A bunch of people who (a) likely have jobs that pay them for their time and (b) have probably never maintained or contributed to a FOSS project, saying that FOSS developers shouldn't be able to make a living doing FOSS.

But somehow FOSS development is totally sustainable in their mind because once you burn out working for free you can be easily replaced?

Please just forget the fact that many large and successful FOSS projects (Linux, Blender, Wine, Gnome, Ubuntu, Godot, the list goes on and on) are maintained and developed by professional developers, who are paid, and who ought to be paid for doing what is very much a full-time job at scale.

By getting a bot to automatically post articles (or worse, comments) you're decreasing the need/opportunity for human beings to post, which makes the entire website less engaging on an individual level.

Sure there might be more "content", but less human-to-human interaction. And personally I feel that genuine human-to-human interaction is only going to become more important with the propagation of mediocre AI generated content. Even thinking in terms of "supply and demand", unlimited bot-created content has very little value compared to increasingly rare human-to-human interaction.

Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather a sub/mag be totally empty than full of AI-generated bot content, because even though it's not ideal it at least gives people like you and me the opportunity to meaningfully participate.

Going into a community expecting human interaction and instead finding nothing but bots is like joining a game server only to find out that it's 18/20 bots. I think it sucks and it's not what I want. Frankly, if I wanted to talk to AI chat bots (and I really don't) there is already no shortage of places to do that.

I do worry a little bit that one day the internet will be so full of AI-generated garbage (words, images, music, etc.) that it will lose most of its value and utility to actual human beings. Centralized corporate social media already has a massive problems with bots and sockpuppets, and technology only seems to be moving in a direction that will make that problem worse. I'm sure the corporate parts of the internet at large will become majority bots sometime in my lifetime, maybe even in just a few years.

So, whether it's Mastodon, Peertube, Kbin or whatever, I genuinely think and hope that the Fediverse represents a small opportunity to keep mostly human communities alive and thriving, and so I hope that bots are used rarely and transparently, if at all.

I have a Steam Deck and I don't even own a PS5, so I'm probably way outside of the market for the Portal...

But I'm really finding it hard imagine this device finding a broad audience, since even in a hypothetical best case we're talking about a subset of a subset of PS5 owners. From what I understand the new PSVR sold pretty badly despite being a pretty solid piece of VR hardware, this feels like a very niche and underwhelming piece of hardware and so I really can't imagine it performing any better.

Someone will buy a PS Portal, and hopefully they like it, but when the smoke clears I don't see it being a big hit.

The Steam Deck OLED on the other hand, I suspect will sell out fast. It seems like there is a pretty big chunk of people who were interested in the first gen Steam Deck but opted for the wait and see approach, and I can imagine a lot of those people jumping on the Steam Deck OLED now that they know the device has lasting power. Personally I probably can't justify the cost of upgrading from the LCD model right now, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to...

This thing is gonna flop hard.

Not really. If they're fulfilling their contractual obligations to their employer(s), then who the hell cares?

It's long past time that we stop treating employees like they're chattel of the company that they work for. You hire someone to do a job, which they either do to your satisfaction or not, but you don't own them and you shouldn't get to control the parameters of their life.