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Comment by kakwa_ | Hacker News Reader

Well, in this specific case, I think the best outcome would be for Apple to merge the module in the MAC OSX kernel so it's there by default, FUSE is kind of a de-facto standard and is clearly a widely useful piece of code.

But, big picture, yes a lot of OSS projects have the same issue. Funding is clearly one aspect, but another aspect is also to work on having less "single person projects" (and I'm not talking about one time PRs but a genuine second core developer). I'm not sure how to encourage that however, maybe more commonly adding "HELP WANTED!" in the project README, maybe a button "I want to become a permanent contributor of <PROJECT>" button in Github, I don't know. If you are alone on a project, even if funded, chances are you will loss interest after a while, leaving the project with tons of possible improvements not realized, and a on/off maintenance, having more "N>1 core developers projects" would help mitigate that.

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Adding someone into a solo project introduces social overhead. That's not necessarily a bad thing and can even be a very good thing (I much prefer making music with other people and seeing how our influences mix as opposed to making music solo). But there is a cost/risk there which I could certainly see some solo developers just not being interested in taking on.

On the other hand, since this is OSS, if an organization does need N>1 badly enough, then they can commit their own resources to it, forking if necessary.

I wouldn't mind if there was a "DONATE" button, I'd certainly donate 5$ or 10$. Under these circumstances even more since this driver is unique and several other drivers I use depend on it. (sshfs, perkeep, ext4fuse, ...) Probably these small but frequently used projects should also be supported by the FSF, at least in the *GPL case.

So this is an area of significant interest to me. I have researched this extensively, talked to a few dozen medium-to-large OSS maintainers, and have a project on the back burner about this. The only conclusion I've been able to draw is that literally every approach from OpenCollective to a PayPal link demonstrably does not work. Donations do not work.

You have to give people something of value, even if nominal value, to actually get corporate interest and to drive the kind of ROI that makes it viable to continue spending so much dang time on these projects. And a lot of people pfft at that and wave their hands about their right to other people's free time (or that an invisible hand will Make Things Work should those people choose to spend their free time in other ways, ignoring that that usually just means other people get to burn out instead). The only sustainable way to build open-source software is to get businesses to pay for it. And that's why we're where we are with these conversations: it's not the end-user free riders who matter, it's the commercial ones.

(I don't think the Redis license is the right approach, FWIW. I think there are better ones. Happy to chat offline with folks who have a similar interest in this space; email's in my profile.)

So release code under duel AGPL and commercial licences...

Most companies won't touch AGPL and will be very happy to pay for the commercial licence.

I agree that that's part of it!

Basically it comes down to companies having systems for paying invoices. It's hard to get small and medium sized companies to make charitable donations - especially to open source which doesn't even help their corporate social responsibility goals.

Yes, exactly. The hard part is how, and that's what I think can be done. ;)

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