Virtually no open source project makes it big without some kind of full time commitment and/or corporate patronage.
However, there also isn't really any incubation mechanism in place for OSS. It sort of grows organically or it fades into obscurity, and that's not necessarily an optimal model.
The solution being that financial contributions early on might inject energy into a project which might otherwise lose steam. It makes sense to me. We've probably lost at least a few cool projects to atrophy-and-entropy land, which is a shame.
You know. Linux. GCC. emacs. gdb. you name it. In fact, some of those still don't have financial backing. Heck Linux certainly wasn't started with Linus thinking he'd gain anything _financial_ with it.
Forced? Don't think that was ever suggested nor even a remote possibility.
>You have to turn the complaint on the head and ask yourself are we better with the code out in the wild even if it's unsupported than not existing at all?
Well, yeah. I don't think anyone's really claimed this is some stark choice betwee financial support or nothing at all. The article, to me, was about improving the existing model.
The relationship is a little more symbiotic than you're implying. Financial backing is as much a "side effect" as it is a necessary pre-cursor to any kind of genuine wider adoption.
> Linux. GCC. emacs. gdb. you name it.
Hadoop, Mongo, Android, My/Postgre/SQL
> Heck Linux certainly wasn't started with Linus thinking he'd gain anything _financial_ with it.
Don't think I ever implied otherwise. This isn't really about motives.
Financial backing quite often simply means that a developer(s) can work on a given project full time. There are real limits to what can be achieved part time and with crowd-sourced code. Take video editing in Linux as an obvious example of this phenomenon.
Yes it's quite a shame that we may have lost a few projects that might have gone somewhere with investment, but I believe that to be the nature of the beast. Also my thought was that the open source movement was about contributing out of good will, and if you made some money off of it great.
I think OSS contributors are driven by a fairly wide variety of motivations. Linus, for instance, has spoken out on this issue :
I do not see open source as some big goody-goody "let's
all sing kumbaya around the campfire and make the world
a better place". No, open source only really works if
everybody is contributing for their own selfish reasons.
Now, those selfish reasons by no means need to be about
"financial reward", though.[1]
However, money does happen to be necessary to devote time to a given endeavor. Without it, the best a project can hope for is a collection of part-timers, which is ultimately limiting.
In fact I would presume that the reason people are not going to pay up front is that they assume the developer is doing it as a favor to the community, and that giving them money for it would break the philosophy of giving out of free will. The real issue though seems to be an overall lack of resources. A one man shop, even with the ability to work on their projects full time, still has a maximum output capacity. Without others to assist there is the chance they would get swarmed with bugs and feature requests leading to burn out.
I think that open source developers need to step back and consider the costs and benefits of their projects. Doing a large amount of projects by oneself without a good job to support on the side will lead to burnout, as we've seen here. It may feel like bestowing a great gift on the community, but if you burn out and halt all development where has that feeling of contribution gone?
Which begs the question of which is more valuable: financial contributions or code contributions?