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It‘s incredibly sad that companies worth literal trillions of dollars don‘t have a couple thousand dollars to spare for open source developers who create insane

It‘s incredibly sad that companies worth literal trillions of dollars don‘t have a couple thousand dollars to spare for open source developers who create insanely valuable software for their employees. I remember that brew‘s (the defacto standard macos package management tool) maintainer had similar projects in the past. Bad tools grind operations to a halt and feel incredibly dissatisfying to work with. Mold is insanely fast and pushing further in a problem space (linking) that can‘t be avoided and has in the past been dominated by slow tooling. Corporations save real dollars when their developer uses free software by open source maintainers, but due to their greed and their top heavy management which lacks insight on what speeds up development they give nothing back. —- One solution I would propose is that industry giants form a general OSS funding collective, which selects interesting / helpful oss projects and grants funding to their developers.

sph 4y ago
Perhaps the idea of creating open source hoping that these trillion dollar companies pay you is misguided and naïve. It's like being an employee and hoping that your boss gives you a raise once in a while. In my experience you have to demand it, and often get it (yet most people are terrified at the idea of doing so), but otherwise the big boss wouldn't try to pay more for something they're already getting (for free). It's not big business' fault, it's how people behave in general. It's basic human psychology. If you want to make a living out of your software, don't make it open source, hope it's complex enough you'll get hired as a consultant, or build a company out of your open-source project. Relying on donations it's like busking every day hoping a music executive offers you a record deal. I've seen far too many brilliant engineers having a hard time scraping by because they have no sense of business. It's a valuable skill to learn.

sph 4y ago

Perhaps the idea of creating open source hoping that these trillion dollar companies pay you is misguided and naïve. It's like being an employee and hoping that your boss gives you a raise once in a while. In my experience you have to demand it, and often get it (yet most people are terrified at the idea of doing so), but otherwise the big boss wouldn't try to pay more for something they're already getting (for free). It's not big business' fault, it's how people behave in general. It's basic human psychology. If you want to make a living out of your software, don't make it open source, hope it's complex enough you'll get hired as a consultant, or build a company out of your open-source project. Relying on donations it's like busking every day hoping a music executive offers you a record deal. I've seen far too many brilliant engineers having a hard time scraping by because they have no sense of business. It's a valuable skill to learn.