I'm sorry this person had to go through abuse and such difficult feelings to handle. Good luck if you read this! I'm with you. > Open source is great, but it's

I'm sorry this person had to go through abuse and such difficult feelings to handle. Good luck if you read this! I'm with you. > Open source is great, but it's not sustainable It can be (I work for an open source company, our friends at Nextcloud are also fine, there plenty of examples of thriving projects), but it's a hard thing to tackle for sure and might not apply to every kinds of projects. As any kind of business, a business around open source requires a solid business strategy. I also think dev libraries / components are probably among the hardest things to fund. I think the tools themselves should be open source and the dev subsidized by something else (a product for which the tool is developed, or consulting, or support, or hosting). You can also sell entreprisy features to companies, even as free software actually (open core is not necessary, and the bulk of the feature can also be in a gratis module and you only sell the convenient UIs). Make it easy to employees of a company using your work to justify an expense. People will be happy to support your work if they like it by making their employer pay, and the employer will most likely be happy to pay because this can be reassuring, especially if support comes with the payment. It's way easier than relying on donations. In any case, your open source business strategy of course needs to take in account that people will use your open source code for free, and will also report bugs, feedback, feature requests, ask questions, and this is costly. Sometimes you can manage to setup a community where people help each other, addressing the issue partially. You'll need to have good communication on what is paid for, what are the expectations, etc; and well prepared answers to requests in tickets that both makes it clear you need to keep the lights on and don't piss people off. With good phrasing most people will understand and be grateful you are providing many things for free. Of course there will be the mean comments. Some are not actually meant to be mean, but just come from people being pissed off or from misunderstandings. Effective communication can help with this. And some just come from jerks, unfortunately. I can only wish you good luck with this. Hang in there. Don't let them hurt you and take bad decisions. Hopefully (fortunately?) they are very few. Keep in mind most people are well meaning, grateful and most are quiet, especially when things work well for them.