Free software needs to find a way to encourage people to contribute so that maintainers get paid.
Caddy has been great!
Caddy has been great!
I had in mind somehow requiring or rewarding everyone to pay a small amount. Like, anyone who uses software from a platform such as GitHub should pay a subscription fee for maintenance depending on usage. It could be small so that it doesn’t interfere with usage. Considering huge number of users, that could pay for maintainers.
The point is, there are large number of users, if each user pays a small amount to the platform, they won’t notice it, yet it accumulates to a maintenance fee.
Paying a maintenance fee makes sense, regardless of how you label it. The entirely free software has problems and may not be sustainable.
Sponsoring right away.
(And this time with a solid option for companies too!)
1. This may have been a misread on my part, on second read, gp's comment says nothing about mandatory payment. The reason I'm wary of mandatory payments is that you'd have to quantify who deserves what, and expend more time on the administration - likey setting up a foundation or company, or which not every F/OSS project needs. Again, I'm speaking generally - a Caddy Foundation, or Caddy Inc. may be appropriate. "Open source project" is a very broad term, ranging in size from leftpad to the Linux kernel, and the needs will be different for each.