<story><title>Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, and going gray</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/open_source_maintainers_underpaid/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>squigz</author><text>It would probably be more sustainable if the companies that depend on 100s of FOSS OS&amp;#x27;&amp;#x2F;libraries&amp;#x2F;applications&amp;#x2F;etc to generate billions of dollars in profit would contribute more significantly.</text></item><item><author>phendrenad2</author><text>Maybe open-source as the load-bearing infrastructure of the world will never be sustainable, and maybe that&amp;#x27;s okay. I think open-source is best when it&amp;#x27;s empowering people to modify and remix their software, and have free alternatives to expensive commercial programs. It seems like open-source has become so captured by corporate interests, that people&amp;#x27;s main motivation for contributing is to add it as a bullet-point on their resume.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bruce511</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s not how companies work.&lt;p&gt;Individuals have agency over discretionary spending, in other words you can wake up and decide to donate money, hire a OSS dev, and so on.&lt;p&gt;Because you personally have that agency, and because companies have lots of money, you project that agency onto companies.&lt;p&gt;But that&amp;#x27;s not how companies work.&lt;p&gt;People at companies have very little personal agency when it comes to spending money. Spending has to be approved, justified, and some value has to be received.&lt;p&gt;FOSS basically is (mostly) incompatible with this model. Some companies &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; pay staff to work on OSS but it&amp;#x27;s rare (and exclusively tech companies with a motivation.)&lt;p&gt;So while your statement is completely true, it&amp;#x27;s also not possible.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s important to recognize that donations and corruption are indistinguishable, and company finances tend to be set up to avoid corruption.</text></comment>
<story><title>Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, and going gray</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/open_source_maintainers_underpaid/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>squigz</author><text>It would probably be more sustainable if the companies that depend on 100s of FOSS OS&amp;#x27;&amp;#x2F;libraries&amp;#x2F;applications&amp;#x2F;etc to generate billions of dollars in profit would contribute more significantly.</text></item><item><author>phendrenad2</author><text>Maybe open-source as the load-bearing infrastructure of the world will never be sustainable, and maybe that&amp;#x27;s okay. I think open-source is best when it&amp;#x27;s empowering people to modify and remix their software, and have free alternatives to expensive commercial programs. It seems like open-source has become so captured by corporate interests, that people&amp;#x27;s main motivation for contributing is to add it as a bullet-point on their resume.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaredklewis</author><text>This would be nice, but since it hasn’t happened so far, hard to see why it would start happening.&lt;p&gt;No idea what the future will look like in general in 5, 10, or 20 years but I am reasonably confident that donations to OSS won’t be drastically more than they are now.</text></comment>