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mcdonje 10 hours ago

Are you not aware of foundations?

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kjksf 9 hours ago | parent [-]

The issue is lack of money not lack of legal structure.

Consider ffmpeg. You can donate via https://www.ffmpeg.org/spi.html

How much money do they make from donations? I don't know but "In practice we frequently payed for travel and hardware."

Translation: nothing at all.

If such a fundamental project that is a revenue driver for so many companies, including midas-level rich companies like Google, can't even pay decent salaries for core devs from donations, then open source model doesn't work in terms of funding the work even at the smallest possible levels of "pay a reasonable market rate for devs".

You either get people who just work for free or businesses built around free work by providing something in addition to free software (which is hard to pull off, as we've seen with Bun and Astral and Deno and Node).

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mcdonje 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Google contributed tons of developer hours for things like bug fixes, without which the project might not be where it is today.

There are examples of foundations or other similar entities paying developers, like Linux, SQLite, even Zig.

Maybe the difference is some projects rely on core contributors more because external contributions are more restricted in some way.

But sure, the entire open source model doesn't work, lol

	▲	saghm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There's a wide gap between the arguments "the open source model doesn't work" and "the open source model failed to produce anything as good as uv after a couple decades of python tooling churn". The latter is why people are understandably unsure of where things go from here.