> I release a ton of my work with open source licensing and I've never thought of it as a revenue stream.

That's the problem - nobody treats being an independent OSS dev as a possible career, so we either get 1) extremely privileged people that have the significant amount of time and resources required to contribute substantially for no payment, 2) open source that serves to promote a corporate goal, and 3) less and lower quality hobby contributions because the rational people realize they're doing free work to get treated by garbage by people that feel entitled to free-as-in-beer software and choose not to do that.

Imagine how much worse any industry would be if nobody got paid for doing it. Now imagine how much better the OSS ecosystem would be if more people could make a living doing nothing but OSS on their terms. That's the goal here. We want to transform OSS from a starving artists realm for privileged people to a place where people can make careers. I'd be totally cool to see some dev-focused ads to make that happen.

It is a sustainable career if you start a business. If no one wants to pay you for your project, that could be the market telling you something.

At the end of, donations don't work and open source is being fairly well sustained if people seek employment or start a business: https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-...

FOSS as business only works for consulting and training, which don't apply to some domains, desktop and mobile for the consumer market as an example.

>If people are financially burdened by making their project open-source; then don't make it open source.

This is largely my position. I view contributing code to open source projects almost as altruism. I don't expect compensation or reward, and I do it out of a general feeling of wanting to contribute something unselfish to the world. The fact that some open source projects are important is a secondary concern; I know I don't consider any of my FOSS code to be important to many people other than myself.

That said, my primary income comes from working on proprietary closed-source software. I don't think I've ever interviewed for a position with a company that contributes most of its code to FOSS, so I've really never seen that model work in-person.

That’s a good point you bring up...where do we draw the line? Lots of projects use Debian and docker, etc...is it even ethical to donate to an npm package before donating to the dozens of free tech layers node sits on top of?

You can't live without a heart, but most people don't get cancer, is it ethical for me to donate to the American cancer society but not the American heart association because Cancer is built on the heart?

No it's my donation I'll donate where I want. If I find joy in donating to a small oss dev instead of a strategic donation to a well organized large one then that's what I do.

Ok, I wasn't confused before but now I am.

Look, all I'm saying is if some javascript developer guilts me into donating to open source, the right thing for me to do (I feel) would be to start from the top of the open source chain.

* Operating system * Code versioning * Container system * CI/CD etc...

It's a long way down before I get to "standard - the javascript linter configuration file".

That's a bit like arguing that Bernie Sanders should give up his housing in Vermont, because No True Socialist would own a house. A good action which is done with good intentions is wholely good, regardless of other good or bad actions that may occur in the same space.

You could donate to all of those projects, but there's no moral imperative to visit them all in order of importance, just because they all played a part.

A permissive license is permission to behave otherwise, and just like Open Source contributions are made voluntarily, your support in kind should be on a voluntary basis too.

Yea I didn't phrase that correctly. I tried to address it elsewhere but it just seems odd that these tiny projects are making so much noise over money while these larger, more integral ones have been going on for decades, providing much more value without turning your install process into a gofundme campaign.

FWIW, I agree. I don't remember the name of the NPM module from the article I just read, and I sure wouldn't have paid them any money if I had been alerted as part of their experiment.

I only donate to obscure Debian derivatives though, so...

>Lots of projects use Debian and docker, etc...is it even ethical to donate to an npm package before donating to the dozens of free tech layers node sits on top of?

Are you asking whether it is ethical to do something that the authors have explicitly said is OK?

> It's not for everyone, so if you already bitch about being hungry all the time maybe you should just look into a day job instead.

The problem is that there's an increasingly influential movement in the software engineering community to shun not only proprietary software, but also several alternative revenue models (such as "software as a service") that use open-source code. If you're part of this movement, then making money off of donations to open-source software is one of only two known, viable ways to be paid to write code (with the other being paid support contracts).

I am not part of this movement, only attempting to provide you with some additional context that might explain some of the opinions you see here.

> That's not my problem! There were 100,000,000 developers before you who had to write the ISA, the compiler/interpreter, the OS, the firmware in every device... If I gave each one a nickle I'd be in worse shape than you are.

Well, I have been giving them more than just a nickel since the late 80's, and still doing pretty ok.

Are you well paid or well off?