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Comment by jiofih | Hacker News Reader

> No direct financial sponsorship (or any funding) for core maintainers to work on cdnjs

Unpopular opinion ahead: I find that demanding money after “voluntarily” contributing to an open-source almost offensive to the spirit of OSS. Money changes the incentives around a community project in an irreversible way. Note that the issue here has nothing to do with financial support.

EDIT: This is regarding the “core maintainers” comment in the linked thread, and not a judgement of anyone’s ability. I gave away years of my own time to open source projects earlier in my career. It was very rewarding in many ways, even financially - what I learned made me a lot better at my job.

Am I not allowed to be ok with that, and believe that a paid contribution model is not ideal for OSS?

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So if someone asks "why don't you do more voluntary work" and the answer is "besides some organizational issues there no financial support" you find that offensive?

That was not the question, and the problem at hand has nothing to do with lack of funding. That actually makes the pledge even worse.

When there are not enough interested persons to keep a project alive, let it die. As shown in other comments, the same infra can be achieved in an automated fashion without the need for lots of human intervention.

How did you get financially rewarded by participating in OSS? eg. did it help you find a job? Did you get donations. Or how did you do it? I think the best route is 1) Get a paid job 2) Do OOS on the job. Meanwhile a lot of people do the mistake of 1) Do OSS for free 2) Ask for financial support

People donating time often donate other resources too, some of them cost hard cash.

It seems like it stopped being volunteer work for the maintainers, but since no one else stepped up, they're stuck with the work. If I volunteer it should mean I can hand over any time and my replacement would be able to take over. Of course if that volunteer work is serving food at the food bank, many can do that. But if the food bank demands I stay and says "we need 20 hours from you this week...", is that still volunteering?

Are you suggesting they are forced to work on it? I don’t really get your point.

Yes, by their own conscience, if you can understand what that is. To spell it out, they'd probably feel bad about walking away from the project, even though it's taking more and more of their time.

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