The downside of this is that OSS can only be produced by people who have a sufficient degree of financial security. No matter how useful a given piece of OSS is, if the creator is not financially secure they're required to either beg for money, or beg for a job.
Isn't it odd that a piece of software, could be widely deployed, forked, starred on Github etc. etc. and yet with all this infrastructure there is no mechanism to ensure that any money finds its way back to the creators unless they ask for it? Some kinds of business people praise the selfless creativity of the open source community while simultaneously conserving their own profits and often denouncing taxation as theft. When challenged, such people attribute all human progress to the profit motive, and thereby in part to themselves, in manifest disregard of the facts. Creative people don't like this but they need to eat and keep a roof over their head, which requires money.
On the one hand, creative people with a mindset of mutual aid and consequent abundance, whose genius expands and structures much of our economy. On the other, well-resourced people who preach a gospel of scarcity and systematically give less than they take. These same people denounce any interference in their profit-making, and choke the unfortunate with externalities because they refuse to bear the cost of cleaning up their own waste, often going so far as to deceive the public about its existence.
How are open source creators any different from blacksmiths, forging the very chains and weapons which bind and oppress them? How much life must be given away, how much filth heaped on heads, before creators will unstop their ears to the laughter of those who exploit and rule over them, mocking their generous spirits and diligent efforts?
It would certainly be interesting to have some form of voluntary micropayments integrated with GitHub. Or, say, bounties for issues and feature requests, where multiple visitors can add their 2c into a shared pot (although that requires moderation to verify the result).
Bounties exist, but because of the reality of development in the OSS space they're not really something you want to lean on for financial security. Pull requests frequently can take a really long time (months) to be accepted, if they're even accepted at all. The bigger projects are the worst offenders in this in my experience (sadly those are also the most likely projects to have bounties). Very large bounties (for work spanning months) paradoxically become the least attractive because of this, because if your pull request doesn't get accepted in that case you've just thrown months of work into the toilet.
Isn't it odd that a piece of software, could be widely deployed, forked, starred on Github etc. etc. and yet with all this infrastructure there is no mechanism to ensure that any money finds its way back to the creators unless they ask for it? Some kinds of business people praise the selfless creativity of the open source community while simultaneously conserving their own profits and often denouncing taxation as theft. When challenged, such people attribute all human progress to the profit motive, and thereby in part to themselves, in manifest disregard of the facts. Creative people don't like this but they need to eat and keep a roof over their head, which requires money.
On the one hand, creative people with a mindset of mutual aid and consequent abundance, whose genius expands and structures much of our economy. On the other, well-resourced people who preach a gospel of scarcity and systematically give less than they take. These same people denounce any interference in their profit-making, and choke the unfortunate with externalities because they refuse to bear the cost of cleaning up their own waste, often going so far as to deceive the public about its existence.
How are open source creators any different from blacksmiths, forging the very chains and weapons which bind and oppress them? How much life must be given away, how much filth heaped on heads, before creators will unstop their ears to the laughter of those who exploit and rule over them, mocking their generous spirits and diligent efforts?