> are an open source project that takes donations: don't get greedy. Two projects I went out of my way to support because they were open source shortly afterwards started "experimenting with models".

How do you know it's greed and not just insufficient donations forcing them to try to find alternative financing? Just because you donated doesn't mean enough people/businesses did.

This is usually the main problem, in most cases the donations aren't enough as main line of income.

Yep. I recall the blog post by InfluxData on monetisation/sustainability and that there's very few options available for an open source software to become self-sustainable, and even fewer working ones. Influx went with the open core route, removing features from the open source version, which kind of killed it.

https://www.influxdata.com/blog/update-on-influxdb-clusterin...

Not enough for what? Paying expenses? Or are you expecting that open source contributions are to be paid at developer rates, and that one should contribute only as much time as is adequately paid?

I thought open source meant that everyone was volunteering by default, just writing the features they'd enjoy to have for themselves, and that sponsorship of development time is not the norm aside from hugely important projects (like bigcorps sponsoring kernel development, but also making billions by launching Android that makes extensive use of this kernel) or projects where the sponsor has a commercial interest. Donations are typically for raising money for things like hosting the website and download bandwidth fees.

Yes, I am expecting exactly that, many developers want to try to make a living from open source.

GPL was never about doing charity.

> GPL was never about doing charity.

Adopting GPL used to be a philosophical mindset consciously chosen (as opposed to freeware), and required some level of zealotry. Now, it's just a means to an end / pragmatics / a tool in the "growth hacking" toolbox because "everyone knows" having an open source project gives it an edge over closed-source equivalents on adoption.

IMO, it's not that open source developers have to earn a living (which they always have since the beginning), but that developers who want to earn a living in any way have started adopting open source by necessity. I'm no purist, regardless of motivation, the more open source projects there are, the better it is for everyone. For once the source is out: it is out.

> insufficient donations forcing them to ...

See, that's the beauty of open source: nobody is ever obliged to do anything they don't feel like doing. If nobody wants to pay, the maintainer can just walk away. If that bothers a user, they can feel free to contribute patches and pay the maintainer's time to review and include them. (Or become a maintainer themselves using a different trademark.)

Of course, the flip side of that coin is that the maintainers are also free to try to turn their repository access into a money making machine. I don't have any issue with it, since I can just fork the code if I don't like it. It's just not the result of getting too little money and being "forced" into anything.

What’s “insufficient donations”? Insufficient for what?

What this is saying is that:

1) There are some large companies that are using Gitea as a core product, and not contributing their enhancements back to the community.

2) We are starting a company that will have Gitea as a core product, and will not contribute our enhancements (“enhanced enterprise version”) back to the community.

I took a look at Gitea's Open Collective, and they have something like $300 coming in each month, and that there is a large amount in the account because of a few large companies, but not re-occurring ones.