Do you not sponsor projects that you get value out of?

I'm not saying you have to, but you asked how they get compensated and there's nothing stopping you from giving them money.

It's easy to forget that you get a lot of value out of something and not give back. If you end up getting a good paying job with your programming experience just buy your favorite projects "a beer" one a month, or once a year. God knows it's better spent there all the subscriptions we have like Netflix or Spotify. Cheaper too.

Also, if the projects are big enough you can usually get tax credit. If you work at a decently sized company they also usually do some charity matching.

▲ arcanemachiner 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Donationware is a viable business model for basically nobody.

Most people won't pay for something if they don't have to.

▲ godelski 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

  > Most people won't pay for something if they don't have to.

Sure, but most people don't need to. Only a small portion need to for the model to be viable. Scale is useful here.

It doesn't work because people that make $100k+ salaries wont buy their "friend" a beer. It's not failing because a bunch of poor people don't donate.

And it is viable because many things already operate this way. The most profitable ones have just convinced companies to donate. That shouldn't be required, but I'm not ignoring the reality.

Besides, this is a reality that is solvable simply by a small percentage of people going "you know what? I will donate". Not "everybody", just a very very small proportion. Let's take ripgrep as an example. Who knows how many people use this, but there's over 64k stars. Let's say 1% donate $5/mo. That's $3.2k/mo for burntsushi, I'm pretty sure he'd be happy with that. He's also a prolific HN user so maybe he'll even respond.

My point is that all it takes is a mental shift from a small number of people. This isn't some "we need huge collaboration therefore it'll never happen" type of thing, this is "I can take action and have meaningful impact today" type of thing.

▲ backscratches 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And yet the majority of all computers dont just have some open source software, their operating systems are open source. The worlds digital infrastructure is largely open source.

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godelski 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Not to mention the majority of business software depends on open source software too! Be it the thousands of libraries we use (so we don't have to implement ourselves and we get better integration with others) to literally building on top of open source stuff (Android, every slicer for your 3d printer, all your servers, and literally millions of other things)

	▲	backscratches 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly, this is what I was getting at. The guy above uses open source software every time he touches anything electric.