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One of the first open source developers I recall seeing raising funds so he could go work on something full time for a year was Paul-Henning Kamp (PHK from FreeBSD). He got the money, but also an insane amount of bullshit complaints from people not wanting to donate because: He pays ~40% in tax, it would be cheaper to pay someone in <insert country>, what if he doesn't deliver, why not someone else, why FreeBSD. I can understand a developer just giving up and not even trying just to avoid the negativity and complaining.

I worked in fintech for a long time, building a product which leveraged a bunch of open source components from the Apache Software Foundation. For years, I advocated with management to sponsor the ASF, or to hire a contributor to build some feature for us. Every time, I was shot down with bullshit arguments. "We don't have money", "It's complicated", etc.

Somehow, there was plenty of money for bonuses for sales weasels, but never any money for key technology. I tried to commit bug fixes whenever I could, and did my best to help out other users on the mailing lists. It would have been nice if the company could have spared a small part of the millions they were raking in ...

A few years ago I worked for a few months with a machine learning team at Google that was using OpenCV. At least at the prototype phase.

The entire $500k donation they're looking for here would have been basically 1 or 1.5 SWE salary.

So yes, there's definitely something wrong with the compensation and financing model of open source infrastructure. And now that the market is contracting, and VC and BigCorp money isn't flowing as freely, people are finally starting to bitch about it, instead of just being happy that a) their projects are being used and b) that that is leading to job opportunities etc.

"but if you make more than X amount of money or have X amount of employees then you have to pay X amount in licensing fees" -- sad to say, projects with licenses like this would be immediately blacklisted at places like Google. Not just for use, but for Googlers to contribute to. And because of the motivation economy in OSS right now, someone else would just fill the niche.

Even the GPL is controversial to these companies (and to many people on this forum, in fact).

We need to name and shame BigCorps that are using and exploiting the very generous and liberal nature of Apache-style licensed projects without (majorly) contributing back.

> We need to name and shame BigCorps that are using and exploiting the very generous and liberal nature of Apache-style licensed projects without (majorly) contributing back.

The corporations are following the exact spirit of the license. If you want to shame them, put it in writing. Make a new license. But it would be proprietary, because you'd be saying some entities are too big to exercise Freedom 0 without paying money to a central organization that held the license.

That's the licensing model for the two big game engines, Unity and Unreal - Gratis, to a point. It seems to work for them, but it ain't FOSS. And for your central benevolent organization to hold that power over the license, they'll also have the power to do worse things to the project. One of the appeals of FOSS was that it's de-centralized. You can always fork it, if you have the code you have the right. A license that required "BigCorps" (because every small company is inherently good?) to pay would have to deny the right to fork.

> Part of me wonders if Copy left viral licenses are the only way to combat this. If you are going to use a bunch of critical open source projects in your code base, and you aren't going to pay, you should at least pay it forward by making your source code available.

This is a tough decision, and one that is going to be different for each project.

GPL will disuade most commercial projects from using your library, which for some people may be a good goal in itself. But the flip side of that is that a GPL'd library has a smaller target audience, which means that the project as a whole will tend to never become as popular as OpenCV has*. That's probably good for the maintainer's health—GPL serves as a good gatekeeper to push away a good chunk of the entitled demands (except for the entitled demands to change the license)—but it may be counter to the maintainer's goal if they set out to make a library with wide reach.

* The notable exceptions to this rule, like Linux, aren't libraries, they're applications or operating systems which can be used without paying it forward.

> GPL will disuade most commercial projects from using your library

Maybe, but it might just as well persuade others who value free software ideals to contribute.

Yeah, like I said, for some projects I could see it being a net positive: using GPL almost certainly increases the ratio of contributors:users, which reduces the burden on the maintainer. If the maintainer is fine with the now-limited reach of the project, then that might be a great tradeoff to make!

I try to make my company to donate money to open source projects but it’s difficult. They would rather spend 100k on some BS enterprise thing that wraps open source software instead of spending 1k on giving directly to the devs.

It’s a weird mindset.

It took me a long time working professionally until I realized why this is (and I find myself agreeing).

You're essentially paying for support (and accountability).

This is why a lot of the more successful open source projects are the ones that monetize by offering enterprise support - this is _crucial_ for something that is key to your company's product.

And while we can all share stories of terrible support, in my experience they are outweighed by the positive ones.

> There is no reason that OpenCV should be struggling to get 500k with all the projects that use it.

The reason is tragedy of the commons. The software is gratis, and they're getting paid the asking price.

On the crowdfunding page [1] they revealed causes why they decided to run the campaign:

> Our goals with crowdfunding the development of OpenCV 5 are several: 1) To make OpenCV 5 our biggest release ever, with the most community participation of any version so far, 2) To prove to other struggling open source projects that crowdfunding is a viable option over seeking corporate donations exclusively, 3) To create a sustainable method of fundraising that OpenCV can return to year after year, making the overall organization and project more robust to global instability.

> Recently, due to global conflicts and instability, OpenCV has lost several core team members, and this has slowed progress on both new feature development and the handling of bugs and requests in the GitHub repository.

> Crowdfunding development of a big Open Source project like OpenCV is a big move. We aren’t aware of ANYONE doing it at this scale. As a non-profit organization, we are constantly fighting to find funding, but we always find support in our community. Instead of spending our time chasing big checks from billionaires, we are putting that community front and center.

[1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/opencv-5-support-non-prof...

There are thousands (millions?) of nonprofits who fundraise incessantly—any org that's mission driven without a profit motive needs to have that activity (and the resulting CRM management) as part of their fabric to thrive.

I think a few of the bigger software projects are realizing relying on a few generous whales is unsustainable when money faucets are turned off... and it's a good thing for the long term stability of these groups to figure out how to sustain the core project.

As long as it doesn't get annoying (multiple appeals every quarter, incessant "support us or we'll DIE!" messages...) I'm fine with fundraising initiatives for OSS.

> As long as it doesn't get annoying (multiple appeals every quarter, incessant "support us or we'll DIE!" messages...)

reminds me of wikipedia

I wonder if they were lost, as in passed away, or just lost as in they live in countries that can’t do business with the organization for legal reasons anymore. Hopefully the latter and they’ll find some way back eventually…

Some licenses like that:

https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0

https://bigtimelicense.com/

There was a discussion here lately about how the budget is fulfilled at the end of a year by spending all the rest of the money on some bullshit. Now I wonder if it could be spent on OpenSource projects the company is using either directly or not and would it count for the auditors to receive at least the same amount of money next year.

> Part of me wonders if Copy left viral licenses are the only way to combat this.

It's a good thought, but we've already seen what happens when this is attempted, such as with GPL V3. The projects just get forked, or even outright replaced (as was the case with Bash in MacOS).

It's going to require a broader mindset change in the developer community. Copyleft and the free software mindset fell out of fashion because, I think, it "felt" to many that there was penetration of open source ethic into the corporate world and the very liberal Apache/BSD-style licenses were leading to take-up and contribution of OSS by those parties.

And frankly a lot of "open source" work actually ended being either "resume" material or "corporate contribution" work.

But I think we're seeing more and more where this can lead -- your thousands of hours of work can just turn into a new product launched on AWS etc that does nothing to enrich you or reward your community for its efforts.

The copyleft model was supposed to counteract this by at least demanding contributions back. And if companies felt they wanted/needed a proprietary license, they could always negotiate that separately. But as you say, tossing GPL on a project has become kind of radioactive. And the copyleft model didn't really scale well into the SaaS world.

>We have seen this time and time again.

What if you're a company that built on top of a prior version OpenCV that does everything you need, and contributed at the time but do not need any of the new things?

Do you and your moral stance think they should continue to chip away at their earnings in yet another rent-seeking play?