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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Who’s asking you to work on it?

All of the people who demand things from the maintainers are. Very few of them are willing to sponsor or pay consulting fees. If you give up they complain loudly, and then often pay a contractor to do the work they wanted.

If they paid $1 each, you would not hand thousands let alone millions of users.

You could though, if the mindset of open source software consumers were to shift to 'pay for things you get value from'. Even if it was $1000 and only companies that paid, the landscape would shift dramatically.

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> All of the people who demand things from the maintainers are.

I think OP's point is that the maintainer is under no obligation to deliver on these demands.

> You could though, if the mindset of open source software consumers were to shift to 'pay for things you get value from'

What if the mindset of producers were to shift? What if people only worked for free on things that they want to work on? Isn't that both more realistic and better for everyone?

>You could though, if the mindset of open source software consumers were to shift to 'pay for things you get value from'. Even if it was $1000 and only companies that paid, the landscape would shift dramatically.

Any solution to a problem that relies on humans becoming more ethical is not, in fact, a solution.

Knowing most large corps, they would rather pay a contractor $175/hr for two months than sign a $20/month license. Also, you usually cannot hire the open-source maintainer as the contractor, you have to use some company with insider relationships.

It isnt the engineering manager's fault at any large company. The policies make no sense, but there may be a larger wisdom that I do not understand.

So become a contractor, work for an inflated fee for two months. Then take a month off and work for yourself on whatever you want. Or just do nothing, if you prefer that to working on your own projects.

Economic injustices and inefficiencies can and do exist in free-ish markets. But this isn't one of them. It's more like "old man shouts at supply and demand".

absolutely true - once sat around in a meeting which the combined cost of the contractors in that meeting was ~$2500 per hour - we met for 90 minutes arguing about which of the customer departments would be responsible for paying the $50/month subscription fee for twilio services for the year.

We could have paid for 50 months of that service with the money we spent trying to figure out who would be responsible for the bill.

If an individual were not the maintainer for a project, they would not be receiving demands from users of that project. The only reason they receive those demands is because they choose to be the maintainer. If they step down from that roll, all of the expectations go away.

If the reason you're doing something is for money, and you're not getting money, then stop doing it. It's that simple.

> All of the people who demand things from the maintainers are. Very few of them are willing to sponsor or pay consulting fees. If you give up they complain loudly, and then often pay a contractor to do the work they wanted.

Ignore them. I mean, it's not like they're paying you. Scratch your own itch instead.

I'm probably being dense, but I'm still not seeing a problem. I think if we dig, we'll find non-monetary incentives that open source authors are a bit shy about admitting to. Otherwise why hold on to the project at all? If you're not being paid, and you think you should be, and that's the only reason you're building the thing, just stop building it.

Open source isn't unsustainable. We've got decades of evidence of that.

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