[mike10921]

Back in the day, Open Source projects thrived on the enthusiasm of creators who didn't view software development as a means to make money. Instead, they saw it as an opportunity to build a community and create superior products through collaboration.

However, the landscape has shifted. When an Open Source project becomes successful today, creators often transition the original product into a proprietary version with added features and support, available only through paid access. This practice undermines the original Open Source project, and usually end off killing the original project.

[asoneth]

> they saw it as an opportunity to build a community

Many small open source projects still operate this way and their community consists a small number of people who have fun hacking on a project together after work.

But as projects grow some of them acquiesce to end-user expectations and slowly turn into "organizations".

They have schedules and regular releases, commit to timely triaging of bug reports, provide forums for end-user support, publish status updates, respond to feature requests, write documentation, have a slick website with a nice logo, form committees and sub-committees to make decisions, adopt codes of conduct to try to deal with the jerks who invariably show up, file the paperwork necessary to deal with big donations, etc -- all the "necessary bureaucracy" that comes with being a large, reputable organization.

At that point you've basically added back all the unfun parts of working and turned it into a second job, so why not get paid?

[x0x0]

People also just get wildly entitled.

I stay anonymous, but I built some software that people use for scientific analysis. I give it away; I don't put it on my resume; the only thing I've gotten from it is it makes me a bit happy that maybe I've saved someone else hundreds of hours of work. There's also some subtle numerical properties that take real work to get right.

(Not all, but some) people demand support, features, or bugfixes; and on their schedule. Or docs, or a prettier site, or blah blah blah, and every second of this takes away time from my real job, my now elderly dog, hobbies, etc. Recently there was a wave of it from some library weirdness on m-chip macs, which I don't even own. And they're guaranteed to get very pissy when I tell them I don't care at all (and, in several cases, if they want me to care they can start by shipping me a new mac and I'll think about it). I honestly mostly just delete the emails anymore because reading them makes me wonder why I'm wasting time on a computer.

As I mentioned, sharing makes me happy and feel like I gave a bit back, but all the shit that comes after that is ugh.

[half9001]

Much of the money that flows into OSS foundations goes to director salaries and unproductive projects.

Some developers get paid by companies, but they usually come late to the project when most fundamental work has been done already (this depends on the project, Linux for example might be an exception in that sponsorship has started comparatively early).

Most developers who have done fundamental work before the commercialization of OSS get nothing. The beneficiaries of the whole thing are developers who are now 25-30, work for FAANG and take over existing projects while not doing really much.

BTW, the real jerks are often wolves in sheep's clothing who do excessively well in the bureaucratic apparatus.

[bdcravens]

That's fairly rare, when you consider the massive amount of open source. There's also many good examples of open core projects.

[onemoresoop]

But the risk is always lurking. I guess this holds of some from contributing to open source projects, fearing this fate.

[dingnuts]

Back in the day, most users were more technical (TFA is about a regular user using DOS, just as an example) so the ratio of contributors to users was higher

When a FOSS project gets big now, users show up in the issue trackers expecting the kind of support they are accustomed to from companies. They do not have the desire or ability to contribute.

Maintainers then get overwhelmed unless they have some way to support these users. Either they can raise money somehow in order to hire help -- like adding a proprietary version -- or get burned out and complain they didn't get enough donations.

This is just reality. We don't live in RMS's MIT computer lab where he set all the passwords to empty because computers should be free and everyone (every MIT student) is capable of writing software and thus should be able to.

Regular people just want to use the software and they will always outnumber contributors from now on.