That's a lie, lots of people donate voluntarily for their favorite free software every day. If you decide to be a leech that's fine too, but don't try to convince yourself others are that way as well.
And if you admit to the existence of donations, then do you admit that you were wrong to say "open source folks don't want to pay for anything"?
Which in any case only a tiny part of kernel contributors can live from.
Is that a roundabout way of admitting that you're wrong and open source can be sustainable?
Similarly, your claim that "open source folks" don't value open source software as worth paying for is straightforwardly false, regardless of whether they pay out of their personal bank accounts or push their Fortune 500 employers to donate money and time (which every Fortune 500 calculates in terms of money).
Most devs though would balk at the idea of paying for Linux.
Balk? You think the MBAs at those big corporations are pushing them to pay for Linux over the objections of the devs? No, devs don't balk, devs are the reason those companies are paying for Linux.
What in the world do any of your points have to do with the discussion at hand? My parent, pjmlp, claimed that (1) open source can't be sustainable because (2) open source supporters don't value open source work as being worth paying for, both of which are contradicted by the incontrovertible facts that (1) sustainable open source projects exist and (2) they're sustainable because of open source supporters who pay for it. Corporate supporters, yes, but corporations are composed of people, and corporate supporters of open source are only that way because their "open source folk".
- Of those which are, such as Linux, they are sustainable not because community cares about them (they might or might not) or because community pays for them (they might or might not), but because corporations find enough vested in them to support them (through money and/or people). I highly doubt Linux Foundation is sustainable without corporate sponsors.
- If you ask a typical dev to pay for a Linux distribution, they will balk at it. A one-off donation? Maybe. And that's Linux, a major and a clearly expensive project. How many projects are there that we take for granted? How many of them are sustained by the oh-so-great-and-generous open source community? Dozens? Less?
There's a very clear division:
- Strategic projects with vested interests get picked up my huge corporations (or started by them).
- A few lucky projects get enough traction to be able to live off donations whole working on them full time.
- The absolute vast majority of all the rest can and do survive only because devs can afford to work on them. As soon as they can't, good bye development and support.
Edit: fixing some autocorrect mistakes.
Or maybe you are trying to disagree with me, in the self-contradictory sentence in which you state that projects like Linux are not sustainable because community cares about them, but because community members find enough vested in them to support them. What's the difference between "care about" and "vested in and support"?
Or, for some reason, you and pjmlp don't consider people who work at corporations to be "community members". Turns out if you exclude most of the people who are paid to work on open source, then you find that there's no money being put into open source!
Look, I'm sorry to be snarky, but it's frustrating to be told facts that don't contradict nor add to what I've been saying, and that I'm already all too aware of. I don't know what point you're trying to make.
If you're just trying to point out that many important open source projects can't get corporate backing to become sustainable, again, I already know that from painful personal experience, but in the case of osxfuse it actually seems like it is in a position to get Google to pay up, and in any case the problem of sustainability in open source is squarely not the open source community's fault like pjmlp implied. That's been my point the whole time. I don't know what yours is.
I'm not saying it's easy, just that it's not impossible.
And I bet only a lucky few of the contributors get to see the money.
18 years ago, since then it's been open source and paid for by donations
>and has some big studios doing those donations
These big studios started donating this past year when the development fund was started (and really took off during the latter part of this year for some reason), before that it was donations and in later years also the Blender Cloud service.
>And I bet only a lucky few of the contributors get to see the money.
Well, most (if not all) of the Blender developers now working full time where Blender contributors, also Blender is a non-profit organization.