[PoutCo]

Open-source sustainability won't be solved by donations alone. As highlighted in the article, donating is incredibly convenient nowadays, so when companies or individuals don't contribute, it's typically due to a lack of willingness.

To take on and compete with the proprietary model, one must generate comparable revenues and attract similar levels of investment. The solution to open-source sustainability is straightforward: people pay for what they genuinely need. Commercial open-source excels in this aspect!

However, as you may know, it comes with its challenges. When a company profits from an open-source program, decision-making authority about what to implement or exclude lies firmly with that company, diverging from the open-source ethos. Yet, the real issue isn't the existence of a business model and revenue, but rather the absence of community control.

This underscores the importance of addressing the root of the issue. To enhance open-source sustainability, we must identify what currently works best and tackle its associated problems. This means embracing a commercial open-source business model while ensuring that decisions about the software aren't solely in the hands of a select few developers or corporations. Instead, a democratic approach should be embraced, where the user community plays a significant role in shaping these processes. Community control guarantees that the software evolves in a way that aligns with the needs and values of its users.

[AstralStorm]

There is no commercial open source model. What happens is that you might get open source software here and there that will be so specialized as to require insane resources to adapt and modify. At least a solid team.

When was the last time you have submitted a patch to say PowerShell?

Democratic process does not exist when everyone is free to start a project. Users also often do not know what they want either until it's shown to them. Surprisingly also true when it's a tool made for other developers.

What you seem to be suggesting is to replace open source model with grant academia model if I'm being generous, and that would kill it. If I were less generous, you're suggesting to have say Microsoft tell OpenSSL devs what they want of them and do it.

[PoutCo]

> Democratic process does not exist when everyone is free to start a project. Users also often do not know what they want either until it's shown to them.

Apparently do not have the same definition of "democracy". The definition that I use is more or less the Swiss system. At the top, a group of people that takes decisions that they think it is the best - and the people that have the power to override the decision if they organize a vote or propose a new law.

> What you seem to be suggesting is to replace open source model with grant academia model if I'm being generous Nope... Read what open-source-economy.com or tea.xyz - that is the future of OSS IMO.

[whit537]

> The solution to open-source sustainability is straightforward: people pay for what they genuinely need. Commercial open-source excels in this aspect!

I define this in the post as "Open Source subsidization, not sustainability."

https://openpath.chadwhitacre.com/2024/the-open-source-susta...

It's fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. It works for products, but it doesn't work well for libraries, frameworks, dev tools, and the like.

> donating is incredibly convenient nowadays

It's convenient to get started but not to scale. I run one of the foremost corporate Open Source donation programs (imo, obv):

https://blog.sentry.io/we-just-gave-500-000-dollars-to-open-...

GitHub Sponsors is very difficult to use at scale (100s or 1000s of deps). Thanks.dev is better but still has a lot of room to grow.

> addressing the root of the issue

Open Source is a common pool resource, and these are funded through collective social pressure, the limit case of which is taxation. More on this in a future post.

[PoutCo]

> It works for products, but it doesn't work well for libraries, frameworks, dev tools, and the like.

That is why we need to create an open-source ecosystem where projects that get paid redistribute to their dependencies. I have in mind 2 OSS ecosystems: open-source-economy.com and tea.xyz

This blog article, for example, explains how a bounty system could be beneficial for the whole ecosystem: https://www.open-source-economy.com/blog/make-open-source-fi...

I would be very curious to hear what you are thinking about those two projects. Spoiler: they are both in the early stage - and both use blockchain.

> More on this in a future post. Happy to read more about your vision!