Developers need a salary to pay the bills. Let's say that covers the first 40 hours of the week.
Those who are searching for significance outside their day job offer free labor as their "hobby". Maybe 10 hours a week?
For projects that want to move forward with some velocity it makes sense to make some of that development into paid day-jobs.
As projects get very large, there's a fair amount of overhead in just "keeping up". That erodes the 10 hours quickly. Further reducing the time to contribute.
So where is all this cash to pay employees coming from? Certainly not end users (as anyone who's tried funding an OSS project from users knows.) No, it comes from commercial companies (MS, Amazon et al) or venture capital.
This is the cognitive dissonance that underpins OSS development. The very people OSS treat as the "enemy" are the people funding OSS in the first place. As much as say RMS rails against big tech, Linux and the rich Linux economy system only exist at the level they do -because- of big tech.
Of course, I painting with a broad brush, and there are exceptions, but the point remains. It's turtles all the way down, and those turtles are not funded by users.
Those turtles didn't need to use funding pre-doc-com-boom, they were passion projects and people with time devoted to the "cause" of FOSS.
>This is the cognitive dissonance that underpins OSS development. The very people OSS treat as the "enemy" are the people funding OSS in the first place. As much as say RMS rails against big tech, Linux and the rich Linux economy system only exist at the level they do -because- of big tech
Perhaps that's the problem: that they exist "at the level they do", meaning most of it is corporate focused, and not enthusiast and user focused.
Even ourselves, as devs, evaluate FOSS as to whether it's "useful" for our corporate/startup needs. This wasn't exactly the case, or at least not the main case for a FOSS project.
Gnome, for example, wasn't created to give RH and co a desktop shell for corporate installs...
The ‘cause’ of oss? I doubt many people ever were dedicated to a cause outside of GNU diehards. For most other people it was about curiosity or fun, a hobby etc.
>> Those turtles didn't need to use funding pre-doc-com-boom, they were passion projects and people with time devoted to the "cause" of FOSS.
Except they kinda did. The foundations of FSF are born by academics working at institutions, getting paid salaries. The were devoting time certainly, and certainly in the case of RMS with passion and cause, but that work was definitely funded - usually by the university.
>> Perhaps that's the problem: that they exist "at the level they do", meaning most of it is corporate focused, and not enthusiast and user focused.
I think we can drop the term "enthusiast". It implies tiny niche group with little practical value. I'm thinking of classic car "enthusiasts" who spend all their time under the car, and precious little driving it.
So let's talk about users. Users want full-featured reliable software. I would suggest all software, if successful, is user focused. (To he honest, I'm not sure what you have in mind with "corporate focused".) Firefox, to pick one project at random will seemingly live or die based on the individual user experience.
Equally take databases - there are s plethora of options to suit every use case. Need big powerful fast enterprise scale - Postgres is for you. Need small footprint with easy install - try Firebird. And a gazillion others. Surely such quality is a good thing?
>> Gnome, for example, wasn't created to give RH and co a desktop shell for corporate installs...
Um. Sure it was. It was designed to offer a gui desktop on top of Linux. Who did they think would use it if not Linux distributions? Given that for decades "the year of Linux on the desktop" was a meme, I'm not sure it's fair to claim that distributions using Gnome to create desktops for business users was a surprise.
