> The solution to open-source sustainability is straightforward: people pay for what they genuinely need. Commercial open-source excels in this aspect!

I define this in the post as "Open Source subsidization, not sustainability."

https://openpath.chadwhitacre.com/2024/the-open-source-susta...

It's fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. It works for products, but it doesn't work well for libraries, frameworks, dev tools, and the like.

> donating is incredibly convenient nowadays

It's convenient to get started but not to scale. I run one of the foremost corporate Open Source donation programs (imo, obv):

https://blog.sentry.io/we-just-gave-500-000-dollars-to-open-...

GitHub Sponsors is very difficult to use at scale (100s or 1000s of deps). Thanks.dev is better but still has a lot of room to grow.

> addressing the root of the issue

Open Source is a common pool resource, and these are funded through collective social pressure, the limit case of which is taxation. More on this in a future post.