Honestly, open source software should come with a price. I think the "starving artist" approach is detrimental long-term.

Sure, there is great value in having a free (in both senses) operating system, but at the same time the year of Linux desktop is a running joke.

To be blunt, money motivates people to do the work they otherwise would not do. It's soul crushing to run the 400th manual test. It's not sexy to work on a lot of the bugs that affect real users, so, when there's no money in it, the work tends to focus in areas of passion and feature development.

Maybe if we all sent $1 to open source projects we use, there'd be enough funding to hire QA people and engineers to fix things like Ubuntu's suspend/resume on my Lenovo laptop, you know?

While I love the idea of a better deal for free and open source software developers, I don't think a sales/transactional model will actually solve the problem at scale.

For one thing, it will eat away at the reasons you like open solutions in the first place. If it became normal/expected to pay for open source software, businesses would control a lot more open source software.

> when there's no money in it, the work tends to focus in areas of passion and feature development.

But when there is money in it, the work tends to focus on quarterly revenue.

> funding to hire QA people and engineers to fix things like Ubuntu's suspend/resume on my Lenovo laptop, you know?

Surely the money you gave to Lenovo would cover that? Like there must be $1 in each laptop they sell that could have gone towards even documenting the hardware so some nice developer can implement a working driver/whatever. Really, it's not the Ubuntu or Linux people that need to be paid to solve that problem, Lenovo is free to submit a patch whenever the hell they want to, they just don't want to.

Canonical and Lenovo both make lots of money already. Sucks that Lenovo doesn't think supporting Linux on your laptop is important.

Personally, I give to projects I use (and ones that need most help), and I'm happy that say my younger self or people with no conditions can still use it without paying. I think there should probably be better coordinated efforts in this direction, from say companies to governments. But meanwhile individual donations are already pretty powerful if even a small % of people that can donate do.

In particular, governments traditionally already allocate resources for the common benefit (their main function really), in public research and public science, public infrastructure, etc.. I think this is just another very significant extension of that.

Also companies benefit greatly from OS/(and OSHW in the future?), and frequently maintain private tools at significant costs. Open source can be seen as a coordination mechanism where everybody can (or rather, should) cooperate to lower costs and benefit everyone (basically, their whole industry or rather society gets more efficient) :)

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