[foo101]

How can we build a society that supports volunteer work in open source? Should governments step in and provide open source grants for important projects just like it does for research work? So much of the world now depends on open source software. This problem needs to be solved soon.

[dunkelheit]

Lack of financial support is not the whole story (there is a lot of blog posts declaring burnout written by very well-paid developers) but I agree that it is an important part.

The problem is that open-source software is a quintessential public good (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) ). Markets fail to properly incentivize creation of public goods and the free-rider problem arises. One approach to tackle this problem that is currently promoted by Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin is called quadratic funding (https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html). Basically the idea is that anyone can contribute a donation to some project and it will be matched using funds from a common pool in such amount as to ensure that the value you get from the project completion is commensurate to the donation amount. Probably not a silver bullet but the idea looks interesting and I like that they are experimenting on small but real-world problems (such as funding open-source projects for the Ethereum ecosystem) instead of just theorizing.

[pjmlp]

It very easy to start, everyone should pay to the projects they depend on, just like other professionals pay for their tools, instead of feeling entitled to free beer.

I help with buying swag, books written by core team members, occasional donation.