> If you use software made by others in their spare time and find it useful, pay them. This should not be a controversial opinion. This should not be a new thin

> If you use software made by others in their spare time and find it useful, pay them. This should not be a controversial opinion. This should not be a new thing. It is not necessarily the only or preferable model. I am spending significant time on developing OpenStreetMap editor and it is funded by grants (currently NLnet foundation). Without such grant I would not have time to work on it. In at least some cases work can be funded by someone who wants some software to exist. Not by direct users. > Why I Don't Write Useful Software Unless You Pay Me Though I admit that I am not getting why someone would maintain for free software used primarily by enterprise software. "Yet nothing is stopping people to bash us, for work we aren't paid for, for a feature we all dislike yet needed to keep due to backward compatibility concerns." If I would be developing logging software like this I would happily deprecate such unwanted feature and announce that I expect X$ in funding to keep it alive for the next year. And remove it if such funding would not appear. Repeat next year. > If log4j2 is responsible for your company's success, you have a moral obligation to donate to the person who creates this library thanklessly. I am not convinced that I agree with that. It was released for free also as in free chocolate. Though log4j2 developers have also no ethical obligation to continue working on it so you should fund them due to good business sense. But if log4j2 developers wants funding and then work for free to support unwanted features... I am not surprised that they do not get funding, I really think that they should list features that will be dropped unless funding appears. With focus on features used by major projects and not useful for hobby developers.