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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that this ceases to be open source. As soon as money is involved, it becomes a company. And the people involved with said company will develop a financial interest in what does/doesn’t get merged. The result of that will be a "source available" project.

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You can govern a FOSS project however you want, reject all contributions if you want, the only factor that matters is the license. It doesn't stop being FOSS.

OSS people tend to think that a specific license is a technicality only needed because it is legally difficult to put things into the "public domain," and that OSS is actually something that has to do with the "spirits" and "souls" of pieces of software, their developers, and their users. The "spirit" of OSS is violated by anything that doesn't seem "fair."

Free Software people think that Free Software is a set of software licenses designed to support certain social outcomes (i.e. they think realistically.)

This statement does not mesh with companies that release open source software with paid employees working on the core roadmap but contributors getting rewarded for significant contributions (and those can be small or huge) as well, nor with foundation-backed open source projects that pay people to work on those projects even if the direction of those projects are fully community-governed.

"Being a company" and "releasing open source" are not mutually exclusive, you're just paying people for spending their time working on your project. You don't pay the reviewers, you pay the contributors, if their contribution was worth it. And they will know whether that will be the case before they even start any work because that's what issues and discussions are for. If you want to do something, and the project owners go "that's not a thing we need", you know that up front.

Projects can get income or donations and still be open source, what matters is the license. While allowing contributors to be rewarded for their work generally creates healthy incentives.

Handling rewards in public discussions on Github naturally prevent bad behaviours from maintainers (ie making bad-faith choices as to what does or doesn't get merged) as they would lose reputation with their contributors and community.

There are many companies that write FOSS software and make money doing it.

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