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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Sure but this sounds like an opportunity for something like “Uber for FLOSS support.” Or perhaps it would be more like OkCupid.

But you could pay money and your FLOSS problems get researched and solved for you by a developer who is experienced in this area.

In practice I can see this as a forum where people make minimal effort posts and skilled people give them quality support. Just as I was forming the previous sentence I realize Stack Overflow and Reddit kind of do this. Maybe it would just be nice if people found a good way to add payment to the process.

Anyway, it’s not as nice as not having the bugs in the first place, but FLOSS has other advantages. There will continue to be people who choose commercially supported software, but the more we can close the gap on quality with FLOSS the better.

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This has existed for a while: https://www.bountysource.com/

It hasn't been a tremendous success story so far - but these things take time.

That's different. I'm talking about participating as a user in a FLOSS mailing list, getting to know the people involved, then asking one of the devs if they can fix a bug or add a feature for you in exchange for money.

The issue is that even if he managed to find a good developer to pay to improve some FLOSS software, it would come out very expensive in the end, first because the UI frameworks & libraries you get in the Linux world are nowhere near what you get on macOS, so the developer will require more time, and also because you won’t be selling that software later on to make any kind of money back since it’s FLOSS, and even when it’s proprietary and not FLOSS, the potential market for Linux software (let alone paid Linux software) is very small.

Hmmm, that seems to forget that there's a large amount of Open Source software available on macOS too. :)

With the UI frameworks and libraries, what's your take on things like Qt then, which is cross platform and pretty decent for developers? At least the C++ ones anyway. :)

Yes but keep in mind people who work on FLOSS are interested in it for more than money, so the person being paid may be willing to work for a little less (or invest more time) knowing that the work that they do is helping FLOSS. So both people can share the cost burden here. We are talking about two people passionate about FLOSS that one is using it despite the problems (and willing to pay) and one has taken it upon themselves to learn how to fix it.

I could be wrong here, but as I recall, there's a psychological effect where an offer of money can reduce the value a developer assigns to their own at-will effort because it shifts the paradigm from noble to economic ends.

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