> I’ve spent over 3,000 unpaid hours over the last four years maintaining some popular open source packages. > Maintainers do critical work which enables compa

> I’ve spent over 3,000 unpaid hours over the last four years maintaining some popular open source packages. > Maintainers do critical work which enables companies to create billions of dollars in value, yet we capture none of that value for ourselves. From TFA, some Open Source contributors are burning themselves at both ends and they should not be reduced to selling paintings on street corners to make ends meet. I'm not arguing that just anyone should be able to earn a living by writing any code and licensing it permissively, but there are some utilities which should be funded that are not, and their ability to obtain funding on their own should perhaps not be the one deciding factor in whether they survive. In my day job, I frequently insist that programmers are bad at estimating, but they persist in asking for fine-grained estimates and making their business decisions based on them. If the success of a programmer team or product team depends on each individual programmer on the team's capability to always make estimates correctly, then the effort is likely doomed. This is a foundational idea of Agile. You can prove this empirically with enough experience; programmers should focus on making their programming skills better, not on precision time accounting and making sure that to improve estimation to become more accurate. Those things have value, but working software is more valuable. A programmer skill level may be completely orthogonal to the programmer's estimation skills, and many of us may not have the capacity for improving both at the same time. Similarly, the success or failure of an Open Source project may depend more on the maintainer team's ability to market the project as a product and derive revenue from it. So, how can we make this easier and more efficient, without forcing everyone to become better at it, individually? (There may not be an answer, but you haven't really taken any time at all to explain what makes Tidelift "not even worth discussing" in your view.)