This is why I personally think the OSS community should be more encouraging of "salary" style funding. There is a loud, poisonous minority of advocates that seem to think that asking for money is just plain evil. That attitude is a material disservice to OSS in general: it makes OSS weaker and less capable, for the sake of some weird puritan reflex.
N.B.: I have never and will never ask for, nor accept any income from OSS work: too much shit-flinging and absurd expectations. But as a _user_ I want OSS, for its own sake, to re-evaluate its attitude towards money.
There seems to still be too many people who cling to the romantic notion that Free Software must be produced for free, as a pure labour of love.
It's absolute nonsense - so many of the most successful free/open source software projects are those with salaried employees working on it, and this has been the case for many years. The problem today is of course finding a way to fund open source contributors whose projects aren't quite aligned with the needs of a major company.
What's wrong with continuing to pay? All the time companies pay for support for open source software because they want the "insurance" of having someone to call when the $hit hits the fan.
You don't want to pay anymore, go back to glibc...
True of an individual company or business unit and its major tech decisions, but businesses ultimately die. Thus we have a world where Cobol coexists with Node.js - companies saddled with old software never pay for a new system until it's "beyond too late". But a company with a greenfield project can come in and use whatever hot, hyped-up thing is out there, and it usually in their direct interest if it's free, because at that point they probably aren't terribly concerned about software quality.
N.B.: I have never and will never ask for, nor accept any income from OSS work: too much shit-flinging and absurd expectations. But as a _user_ I want OSS, for its own sake, to re-evaluate its attitude towards money.