I don’t agree with his problem statement that OSS developers need payment.

I think that paying people for valuable work is a good thing. But I don’t think there is a problem with this as evidenced by 50 years of great OSS software written by professional and amateur developers.

Saying I spent 4000 hours on a project without pay is not enough info to be useful to determine that I need payment. I volunteer time to lots of charities, I don’t then say I need payment for this time. I also spent countless hours on hobbies, this doesn’t entitle me to payment.

If I put an annoying ad into people’s consciousness because I spend 3000/year organizing my magic cards, that’s not really relevant to most people.

I think another thing the author misses is that Standard is _just_ a formatting library. It doesn't need/deserve as much resources as libraries that do more and deliver more value for the developer/company such as Vue, webpack etc.

> If even I – with my fortunate position – can’t make a comfortable living working on open source, then how is anyone else supposed to make it work?

If living comfortably is Feross's goal, why not get a job? This is a high profile programmer in one of the highest demand, highest-programmer-wage places in the world. What am I missing?

Popularity does not equate to value. Perhaps the market simply does not see his thin eslint wrapper as a valuable tool.

> Open source maintainers need income to fund their work.

lol if you need to make income from your work, don't give it away for free. Should everyone demand getting paid now for working on hobby projects?

That is worth reading, and he makes some great points, but there’s a jarring shift in it. At the start he talks about it in terms of:

I would love to find a way to help maintainers capture at least a bit of the value we create so that we can happily continue to write new features, fix bugs, answer user questions, improve documentation, and release innovative new software.

But after it was received badly, he switches to:

Folks who contribute nothing don’t get a seat at the table. Rich Hickey said it best in Open Source is Not About You:

Which seems contrary. Rich Hickey’s post is that open source is built for oneself (one person or one company) and then released to the world in whatever state it was used internally. Other people aren't paying, so they don't get a say. The opening position is that open source is created and maintained for the benefit of others.

It can be either, neither, or both for different projects, sure, but to suggest that people take up maintaining unseen infrastructure code so that they can answer user questions and write documentation and code new features to help people and also don’t no have to listen to anything those people say because it’s done for one’s self and not about those people at all.. which is it?

People who tidy the commons for the council are employees, and do what they're told. People who tidy the commons of their on volunteer effort get to choose what to do but don't get to stick a price tag on it. If you do it for yourself on your terms, you don’t get anyone’s money. If you do it for others and want their money, it’s a job but you have to be controlled by what they want because it’s a job.

If you do it for guilt and charity, who gets to thrive off charity work in other fields?

If you went to a local park and found someone had picked some poison ivy, and left an advert there instead, would you approve?

This is highly unrelated, sorry, but does anyone know the zsh theme used in that post (https://feross.org/images/funding-screenshot.png)? I didn't see anything like it in the list of zsh themes (https://zshthem.es/all/). The colored arrows look very appealing if they're contextual, like if they denote the status of git files (deleted/edited/added).