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That's a good question. I'd assume "work for free" could be more accurately worded as "taken advantage of". After all, the vast majority of FOSS projects involv
by colejohnson66 3y ago
That's a good question. I'd assume "work for free" could be more accurately worded as "taken advantage of". After all, the vast majority of FOSS projects involve unpaid labor, and no one complains about "working for free" in FOSS.
What I mean is this: when a FOSS project is entirely community funded, one's hard work is just giving back to the community. But once a profit is made by the project, your hard work should now be compensated. Otherwise, you're being taken advantage of. For the forum OP, they're probably coming from the view of "why should Juan (and others) get paid for shipping half complete features when I'm not just paying out of pocket for the server everyone uses, but trying to help as best as I can (bug reports)?" After all, $8M for W4 is supposedly gone while Godot itself is in the negative every month? On the surface, that looks sketchy.
There is a bit of entitlement in such a thought, I'd argue, but it's not completely unjustified.
For another example, Linux's and Blender's main developers get paid, but they're the exception to the rule. Any community involvement in the form of patches and bug reports are all unpaid. But people don't complain about that because the Linux Foundation and the Blender Foundation are both non-profits. W4, however, is a for-profit. So, millions are going to a for-profit organization while the people working on the non-profit side languish.