Hmm? Their time is valuable. You are being asked to pay for their time. If there's a broken traffic light in the city, do you expect some workers to come and s

Hmm? Their time is valuable. You are being asked to pay for their time. If there's a broken traffic light in the city, do you expect some workers to come and spend their time fixing it just because it's broken and it's a good thing to do, or do you expect them to get paid to do it? Now, one could argue that fixing bugs in open source software is a public good, like the traffic lights in a city. So maybe the government should pay for it? Well, I could perhaps buy that argument, but getting increased public funding for that sort of thing is likely to be hard, and it's hard to tell where that money is best spent. But certain fixes, or new features, will help some people a lot more than others. If you would benefit from a particular bugfix, and someone else will need to do work for it, why not they ask you for money to fix it?