Projects and organizations that do get a large portion of their funding from donations usually need to spend a lot of time marketing and evangelizing to get those donations. A solo open source developer probably doesn't have the time to do that, plus write the software itself.

But nowadays it seems like everyone who creates a JavaScript package that concats two strings together, wants to be able to quit their day job and live on donations. It's just not realistic.

It’s basically the same level of expectations on both sides: nobody is expected or obligated to do anything; they do so because they want to, or because they believe it is a mutually beneficial decision. It’s kind of like the comparison of engineer salary vs open source donations. Yeah, on one hand, open source donations are not likely to pay you enough to live in most cases. On the other hand, it’s money given to you under essentially no obligations. The same reason you can’t really complain much about the support you get from open source maintainers; there was never really any obligations.

But, I believe that open source has proven itself enough to have earned more donations and funding, and that there’s plenty more funding that could be making its way to open source if we could resolve issues with routing it there.

The reason why I don't like to put money in open-source work is it attaches a value on something where I would consider the work priceless and personal.

It makes the work feel cold, or transactional. I'm sure others would agree.

a) At a personal level, it forces the user to make choices. Making choices is exhausting. Should I donate $1, $10, or $100? Should I donate based on my perception of how much each project lacks funds, based on how much value I extract out of the software -which is not easy to quantify anyway- or just send an amount that I wouldn't miss? Should I donate one-time and forget about it or set a recurring donation? If recurring, shouldn't I monitor the project's development to decide if a recurring donation should continue? Then would it not be fair to hunt down every single free software project I'm using and evaluate its needs and value in order to donate to that as well?

Personally I admit that I rarely donate to free projects as an individual, unless they explicitly ask for a fixed amount that I find reasonable, because I dread the process of such decisions.

2) At a business level, usually there is a complete detachment between the value drawn out of a piece of a free software and the process of donations. The company is there to maximize its profits and minimize its costs, donations exist at a separate sphere that has more to do with financial/tax or PR incentives than the intrinsic value of the free software project, so all donations tend to get send to recognized charity organizations.

Very often the people who understand the value that a piece of free software brings to the business, have the right mindset and want to donate, but there is no process to make it easy for them to do so (it would be awkward to put a purchase order to the finance department for a donation).

For that reason, I would encourage every free software project that cares about funding to sell something at a fixed price, that can pass for a standard purchase in the eyes of a non-technical person -i.e. call it support/maintenance plan, or premium forum access. Even if in reality it adds nothing to the value of the software, it makes it easy for IT departments to support projects they are using that they would otherwise not be able to. Speaking from experience, it's very frustrating to see how much a company spends for bullshit and not be able to donate even a small amount to projects that bring much higher value to the company.

I don't understand it, so I don't think it's fair to call it "understandable".

I use almost entirely Open Source tools as a game dev for various reasons (some ideological and some practical). All of them get money from me on a monthly basis. It's a security thing; I give them money because I want them to stick around and because there are features that they're working on that I'll need for future projects. Paying them money is much more cost efficient and much safer than trying to build all of my own tools, and much safer and more future-proof than buying into commercial engines.

What I get out of that arrangement is closer relationships with the developers, slightly more input into how software gets built, but mostly just confidence that the products will get better and an increased likelyhood that devs will fix things that are incredibly annoying to me. And some software products (Blender in particular) have shown that this model can work really well if there's enough buy-in from the community. Blender/Krita will even let you sponsor development on specific features if you're willing to pay enough money.

Unfortunately, like with anything else, products suffer if there's not enough funding, and a lot of Open Source products are underfunded. There's an open question in the OS world about how you get people to donate voluntarily rather than forcing them to give money. People don't have the perspective I describe above, it's not an intuitive way to the think about software.

But if you're not in that boat, if you're actually willing to pay money purely to get better software, that's a solveable problem today. Many Open Source products support donations, and at the scale you're talking about (equivalent to Mac, one or two devs make something really good as their job), getting donations to the point where people can work on a project full time would be enough to get the kind of quality boosts you want. Most Open Source projects accepting donations are not at that level yet, but again, if you genuinely want to pay money to increase software quality, you can do that.

But it does require a shift in thinking, you have to break away from the philosophy that the Mac ecosystem has aggressively drilled into you that says you pay for access to things. In Mac, the way you support developers is you pay for access, and as a side effect they build better apps. In Linux, (most of the time) you pay for development, not access. Everyone understands in theory that we pay for software because we want the software to improve. But theory is different than practice, emotionally we buy software because we have to. In Linux with Open Source, if you want software to get better you are forced to internalize the underlying theory -- you have to get your brain to actually believe that you are paying for continued development instead of access to something that already exists. And then at that point, you realize that kicking someone $5-10 a month so that they'll add new scripting APIs to Tiled is actually a really good deal.

Mac's system has the advantage that it forces everyone to participate, so it's easier for Mac developers to get enough money to focus on building really polished products. Mac doesn't require its users to believe that they're paying for development. The weakness of Linux's system is it doesn't force everyone to participate in supporting the ecosystem, so there's way less funding. But while that's a legitimate criticism of Open Source, it's also a purely social/psychological phenomenon. There's no law of nature that means we couldn't collectively pay developers of Open Source apps enough so that they could devote the same amount of time to development as Mac devs do.

And if we did that, then quality would skyrocket, Mac is proof of that. The Mac app ecosystem proves that you don't need giant companies to have great software, all you need are a few developers per-app that can afford to put all of their attention into their apps instead of just their free time.

For infrastructure tools that are typically adopted by an entire org or company though (as my products are), the situation is less understandable to me, even in the scenario where the user is a small bootstrapped company or solo dev.

I mean, my own company is small and bootstrapped, and I still pay for a number of commercial products because they provide benefit to my business or my own productivity. If I ever can't afford them in the future, that would probably indicate there are deeper existential problems with my business besides needing to rewrite some code to avoid use of those commercial products :)

Also, personally if I wanted to give money to open source software but was unsure about the future affordability of doing so, I would especially focus on donating to open source projects that are actively soliciting donations in the first place -- rather than arguing with a business owner over their lack of interest in donations, which is what some users have done in my case.

Until now every single awesome open source project has managed to take off without a kickstarter campaign. Nowadays everyone promises to deliver an awesome open source project if you first provide funds.

I have donated to many open source/free software projects, either directly or through crowdfunding when they had a specific goal (eg libre graphics meeting, a full time dev to refactor kdenlive).

But I am really skeptical of someone who wants money before he delivers anything. Free software needs the kind of love that money can't buy in order to be successful.

I will gladly help free software projects but not so gladly free software promises.

Which may explain why people can feel entitled to getting paid for their efforts; we tend to feel that if we give something to others they owe us something back (this is why we have a bunch of laws against giving and accepting gifts in certain situations, because of the societal pressure to make it an equitable exchange), and it sometimes takes intentional reminding of ourselves that that's not how giving works, and that there is no actual quid pro quo obligation.

I mean, I feel the burn when I give money to Debian, Arch, KDE, etc - but I do it because I know I have to, because the software is so important to me. The $500 or so I donate each year is a lot of money to me, and I'm in the US - I cannot imagine how much donating to these projects would hurt the international users who make significantly less than the 15-25k or so I make annually.

I don't know how KDE managed it, but Blue Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Systems) is a Germany company founded by one Clemens Tönnies, Jr. Don't know anything about the guy, but he is somehow paying 10+ KDE devs without a business model. I've donated a lot to Kubuntu, but I cannot imagine in a million years they get enough donor money to fund all the devs they employ.

But those kinds of philanthropies, the way Mark Shuttleworth keeps Canonical afloat, seems to me to be the only practical way to keep free software afloat. You cannot ask a million destitute people to donate money they need to eat or sleep comfortably, but we as a community don't have the charisma or ears to get fat cat donors to foot the bills. Probably because software freedom does not matter as much when you are wealthy - you can just pay to get the software you want made anyway, and you might even be able to bribe companies to give you the source if you care enough.

And I recognize a huge portion of the donor pool for most free software projects isn't either end of this spectrum, but people like me making something above the poverty line and below extravagance that donate what they can where they can, but that is consistently shown to not be enough. And I imagine it is more because it takes millions of average joes paying dollars to match what one millionaire can do in an instant.

As someone who runs a small open source project that clearly states that Patreon donations are accepted and even offers some convenience benefits to donors, I often see people jumping extra hoops to avoid it, including clearly profitable companies that saved many thousands by using my software, spending extra time that would amount to more than those donations. So far I get donations from less than one percent of my estimated users.

I also know the feeling of people getting mad when I make a change that I believe it is good but others (users) hate it.

I agree and would like to echo chamber the issue that for every maintainer there are thousands of users that don't give back anything, not even a thank you.

I think our reliance on github causes us to have inefficient or ineffective tools to promote good opensource.

I think github sponsors has been a good idea but its execution is extremely poor. (Tl;dr it is ineffective and doesn't plug in the rest of the echo system)

There is some psychological aspect for sure in using open source code and not paying for it: the moment you pay you expect some entitlement over support and direction of the project, but I am know psychologist.

That being said this blogpost is great, but nothing ever changes as a result, sadly.

The problem is that open-source software is a quintessential public good (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) ). Markets fail to properly incentivize creation of public goods and the free-rider problem arises. One approach to tackle this problem that is currently promoted by Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin is called quadratic funding (https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html). Basically the idea is that anyone can contribute a donation to some project and it will be matched using funds from a common pool in such amount as to ensure that the value you get from the project completion is commensurate to the donation amount. Probably not a silver bullet but the idea looks interesting and I like that they are experimenting on small but real-world problems (such as funding open-source projects for the Ethereum ecosystem) instead of just theorizing.