I see comments on posts such these very often where people complain about opensource products like Linux phones, Linux itself, or pretty much anything else, not being as good as their proprietary, funded, and profits driven alternatives. How are such projects supposed to compete without money and full-time developers? Especially when people are unwilling to donate to them “because they just aren’t there yet”, how do they expect the projects to quickly get to a point where they are boob friendly and usable?

People will disparage groups that try to make something with barely any funding and time. There are so many negative comments about the PinePhone, Phosh, PostMarketOS, and so on. It’s disappointing to have such a community.

As soon as an opensource project asks for funds, integrates a question for funds in their software, uses a restrictive license or something like a business source license, someone will complain about it on social media and blow up the maintainers’ repository and socials. Why are we so averse to opensource contributors earning a living writing opensource?

If people don’t want to fund opensource (or “source available”) until “it’s ready” and resist any attempt to make money from it, how it the model supposed to succeed in being an alternative for the majority?

Sorry for the rant, but why can’t we as a community be more active in supporting our opensource contributors instead just waiting for the apples to fall into our and their laps?

  • MudMan@fedia.io
    2·
    2 days ago

    That works. Home Assistant is unpaid open source, but they have a separate org that sells hardware boxes for profit and has a subscription service for server-side voice recognition and to handle auth over the internet for remote access without having to set that up yourself.

    Makes sense as a service, it’s decent value and it takes crap out of your hands you may not want to do even if you’re hosting the software. Win/win, as far as I’m concerned. Just because your core project is OSS doesn’t mean you can’t sell other stuff related to it, from merch to support.

    And if you don’t want to have any of your data outside your home server… well, then don’t do it and set up those services at home. You’re paying for convenience, not for the software itself, so it’s up to you.

    Not every project will work well with that sort of scheme, but it’s certainly viable, and nobody is particularly mad at HA for doing things that way.