This is a very interesting view of the current issues surrounding the funding of open source. I think there are also some assumptions surrounding the motivations of being a maintainer that may not be accurate.
As the founder of a company that's sole purpose is to bring funding to open source developers, bloggers and app builders, I do understand the issues with the "trickle economics" of generating funds for open source.
Let me first say thank you for your contributions. I do not believe that most people become open source contributors/maintainers for the money. They do it b/c they are good people trying to give back to their community.
The way I see it, maintainers need to be open to many different paths of generating funds. Open Collective and Patreon are incredible, however they often require an active effort in fund-raising to generate any significant amount of money. Tidelift is doing great stuff in this field as well by selling SLA contracts on open source projects, although it's difficult to qualify and the developers might not want to sign a contract. There is the promise of crypto-economics and how they might impact funding OSS (see https://oscoin.io). Finally, advertising (yuck?) has been a proven and more widely accepted form of funding as long as the user's privacy is protected. That's what we do. Fund open source maintainers through ethical advertising.
It takes a village to solve sustainable funding for open source.
This is a very interesting view of the current issues surrounding the funding of open source. I think there are also some assumptions surrounding the motivations of being a maintainer that may not be accurate.
As the founder of a company that's sole purpose is to bring funding to open source developers, bloggers and app builders, I do understand the issues with the "trickle economics" of generating funds for open source.
Let me first say thank you for your contributions. I do not believe that most people become open source contributors/maintainers for the money. They do it b/c they are good people trying to give back to their community.
The way I see it, maintainers need to be open to many different paths of generating funds. Open Collective and Patreon are incredible, however they often require an active effort in fund-raising to generate any significant amount of money. Tidelift is doing great stuff in this field as well by selling SLA contracts on open source projects, although it's difficult to qualify and the developers might not want to sign a contract. There is the promise of crypto-economics and how they might impact funding OSS (see https://oscoin.io). Finally, advertising (yuck?) has been a proven and more widely accepted form of funding as long as the user's privacy is protected. That's what we do. Fund open source maintainers through ethical advertising.
It takes a village to solve sustainable funding for open source.