And it's pretty obvious why -- a purchase is a transaction with a clear expectation of what you're getting in return. If you donate, it's unclear what you're paying for and what the maintainer's obligations are.

The notion that you'd make some useful open-source project used by multi-billion-dollar companies and they'll throw a few pennies your way to make sure you keep the project alive is hippie bullshit.

Unless it's truly a well-established and well-governed project with a diligent maintainer at the helm (e.g. Vue.js), the only way companies financially support open-source is by contributing work or hiring the maintainer.

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.

Relying on donations seems like a bad move, business-wise, because I'd guess (no data to back this up, just gut feeling) that most donations will come from individuals and not busineses, yet the businesses are the ones making money off of your code.

I agree with the premise of your point, though.

Open source projects with the most tractions are either sponsored, or someone is writing open source code as part of a job they're paid for. (a few examples: Rails, node.js, Linux, Vagrant ....)

For projects where that's not an option, crowdfunding is a good alternative.

Most "involved" in open source are consumers. Crowdfunding allows for involvement and support at a different level, and is totally consistent with the open source ethos. Open source is about freedom, not money.

Let’s not kid ourselves, probably no one is going to make a living from github sponsors, and projects that bring in any significant money are probably written by developers who already make good money do something else anyway. This would basically be beer money to them.

You would be amazed at how people that do not contribute any sort of money to an open source software project will come in and make demands to the creator to implement some feature or fix some bug. Now imagine if they donate $10 and suddenly feel like there is a debt the creator must pay to them by doing what they want.

I will not be using github sponsors for my open source projects. Instead I will continue to ask for things like tickets to conferences or speaking engagements where I can better develop my brand and clout. That’s the way it should be, but that’s just my opinion.

That said - perhaps I haven't looked hard enough, but it just doesn't seem like projects that accept donations make enough money (on the whole) to be worth the time spent setting up donations.

Sure, I've seen maybe two where a developer ends up being able to work on their project full-time (that's the dream), but most seem to make like $5/year or whatever.

Am I wrong? I would love to be wrong.

I'm starting to think everyone who can write code should try to contribute what effort they can to an open source project. I'm starting to see how a lot of small individual contributions add up over time. A project still needs a good maintainer and vision though, and that's a lot of work for someone.

I'm in-between jobs right now(occupied with a side project), but at some point I'd really like to fund feature development on some open source projects:

* GNUCash has a solid heart, but has some usability issues that make it a pain to use in practice.

* Freenet last I checked had only 1 fulltime developer. And he's probably taking a serious cut to market salary to work on it.

* GHC could stand to have some performance optimization done on the compiler.

* Inkscape or GIMP are handy to have around. Inkscape even has a page describing how you can host a fundraiser for targeted feature development, which is very rare for open-source.

* I don't know that TOR needs much software help, but I wouldn't mind funding some exit nodes. It'd be nice if you could buy a locked-down black-box exit node that you could plug into your wall or something, that was guaranteed not to incriminate you. Maybe outside the scope of this, though.

* Everyone has a little app or site they use where a few people are working without much benefit to maintain something you use all the time.

Is there a good list of needy open-source software?

It comes down to donors expecting something back for their donation, while authors expect something back for all the effort they put so far into the project that is obviously useful to other people.

For my open source project I made a hard decision not take any money. This curbs expectations and puts users at disadvantage, but lets me take as much time off as I want and I sleep better.

(Project on which I received donation: https://github.com/mockoon/mockoon)

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 me, if I got donations that'd be great, but it'd not introduce necessarily a different sense of responsibility for my work, I'd keep doing exactly the same (unless I was explicitly hired as a contractor, but that's different). I do not particularly mind not being paid though, it's me who is putting my own code out there for people to use, for free!

Now I make mainly open source JS libraries and use the fairly liberal MIT, if I worked in end-products where there might be a bit more of a "competition" or a big company might literally repackage/resell your product I might release those under a different license, like dual-licensed or similar.

It’s a weird mindset.