It happens all the time, a maintainer quits/abandons some opensource project due to economic realities. There are comics, jokes, threads, and so on about what the realities of maintaining opensource software are and that most people are not willing to donate or contribute in any way besides opening issues.
There is a lot of resistance to stuff like the business source license, but people do have to earn a living somehow. Doing so with opensource would be amazing. In lieu of the contested licence, could a template similar to Reminna’s actually work? Basically “pay to get this fixed/implemented, make a PR, or it’s low priority/ ‘I will get to it when I get to it’”.
Relevant part of template
### Contributions
In return, or to fix this issue, I'd be willing to:
- [ ] Fix this myself.
- [ ] [Donate](https://remmina.org/donations/) ___ and/or have donated ___ towards fixing it.
- [ ] Take a donation of ___ to fix it.
- [ ] Update the [documentation](https://remmina.gitlab.io/remminadoc.gitlab.io/md__c_o_n_t_r_i_b_u_t_i_n_g.html).
- [ ] Update the [wiki](https://gitlab.com/Remmina/Remmina/-/wikis/home).
- [ ] Translate Remmina in my native language(s) (___) on [Hosted Weblate](https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/remmina/remmina/).
I worry that approach would increase feelings of entitlement from people who don’t understand the process and effort involved with development.
It systemizes the notion of “I paid you to do X, where is it?”, a perspective which some annoying people already have even without giving anyone money.
Additionally, how do you determine how much payment a feature is worth?
What if the community is split about the direction of a project, and there happens to be two “pay for high priority” demands that conflict with each other? Who gets their feature that they paid for?
I also think that the people actually working on a project should be the ones setting the direction and priorities for it, not whoever has a big enough purse. We don’t need to replicate corporate models that deny developer autonomy.
The final decision stays with the maintainer. Always. Higher priority doesn’t mean certainty of implementation. The dev/maintainer can always do the things they like. It’s their project and if somebody doesn’t like it, they can fork off.
That’s up to the dev. They can say “my hours are worth this much, I estimate it’ll take X hours”. It will also give people an idea of just how much they are getting for free (the ones who don’t pay). The dev can also have a simple scale of small, medium, large, enormous and assign a value to each.
That really depends on how payment is organised and what the terms / conditions are. It could be paid after the fact, it could be paid in increments, it could be held in escrow by a third party, and so on.
Anti Commercial-AI license