Wow, thank you very much for the detailed comment! What you're saying here makes a ton of sense, and I really appreciate the words you chose to describe the phi

Wow, thank you very much for the detailed comment! What you're saying here makes a ton of sense, and I really appreciate the words you chose to describe the philosophy behind Open Source. "Gift" is very apt. That is exactly what many projects are to authors. It's just icing on the cake for them when a project takes off or they help people. One area that I'd say comes to mind for me is: Many devs aren't even able to accept money for maintenance because their job prohibits it. Like at Google or other bigger tech companies. You just can't receive money and then you're already busy because you're working... why go do more grunt work for free when you could apply that effort to making more "gifts" to give to people? It's an interesting dilemma to ponder about. What you said about the "market economy" is absolutely right when it comes to thinking about SaaS or other traditional proprietary licensing models. They're solving for the market economy exclusively and not for the Open Source one. It feels like a fools errand to attempt to convince somebody working at Google to care about patching one of their side projects for free. I'm going to give that some more thought. Maybe some kind of package registry that allowed updates to a package by separate maintainers, even if the author goes MIA?