It is irresponsible if you believe--and I don't say this pejoratively or to caricature the argument--that somebody takes upon themselves a responsibility when t

It is irresponsible if you believe--and I don't say this pejoratively or to caricature the argument--that somebody takes upon themselves a responsibility when they open-source software. I used to think this was the case, but less and less often I find this to be true. In a practical sense it becomes a free-rider problem and people with money aren't stepping up. In the absence of accepted responsibility from (monied) consumers, the way responsibility is ultimately taken on has to be either to affirmatively take it on (as public service to the community) or to pay for it. Which is a sticky problem because it's hard to pay for it and it's invariably not presented effectively in terms of building a business case. Existing solutions, not to put too fine a point on it, suck at building that case. OpenCollective, the remnants of Gittip/Gratipay, etc. - incentives don't align to put money where it needs to go, and J. Random Consumer often suffers the most for it. I have a pretty strong idea about how to solve it for-reals. At the moment, though, it's a time/money problem for me; I'm not in a place to chase the kind of (relatively small) funding that the problem probably requires. If anyone else is interested in this problem space, please feel free to email me directly; I'd be happy to chat with you and I'm very interested in seeing this done well.