While I applaud compensating FOSS developers, there’s a devil in the details: all software stands on the shoulders of many giants. The nature of software, and software users, means that most money is going to go to front-end developers, regardless of effort. They, in turn, would have to rigorously re-distribute most of that money to the developers of the great many many libraries and frameworks that their software depends on. I would argue that it is practically impossible for this trickle-down to happen fairly, which would result in developers of deep, indirect dependencies used by everyone being ignored. Throw a shitty, low-effort GUI on restic, and you’d end up with all the donations. If you’re ethical, you’d give 99 cents for every dollar to the restic devs; how likely is that? An added wrinkle is that people are really bad about estimating the relative worth of their efforts; even if everyone in the stack is ethical, how do you estimate the relative value of your effort against the effort of the database binding library you use? How much of your donations do you give to each developer of the 40 libraries you directly import?

Another issue I personally have is that compensation invites obligation. It breaks the itch-scratching foundation of FOSS.

Finally, I think introducing money into FOSS is a virus that ultimately destroys the only functioning communism in the world. It changes developer behavior, or at least introduces perverse incentives, in undesireable ways. I’d rather end-users contribute in whatever way they can: well-written bug reports, PRs that fix spelling in docs, wiki “how-to” contributions, code contributions. From each, according to ability. That’s what keeps FOSS running, and that’s the spirit of FOSS.

Now, I’m fully in favor of for-profit companies funding and supporting projects. They’re making money off FOSS, and should roll that down. All of the same trickle-down issues apply, and certainly it introduces the same perverse incentives, but greed should have a cost, and all for-profit companies are by definition engines of greed.

I only skimmed your article, but so far I like what I am reading, and how you dovetail it into a discussion about UBI and so on.

But one quick criticism: if I were you I would try to get a bit more well-versed on the difference between “free-as-in-free-beer” software, “free-as-in-freedom” software, and “open source” software. There are lots of articles about this, especially at the The Free Software Foundation. But in short:

• Free as in “free beer”: you can use the software without paying for it. They are usually making money off of you some other way, by charging certain users fees, by collecting and re-selling your private data, selling ads, or all of the above.
• “Open source”: means the source code is available and you might even be able to contribute to it, but the maintainers reserve the right to distribute modified builds of the “open source” version that can make money off you the same way “free beer” software does. It is a good way for large companies to get free work done for them (bug fixes, feature requests) from their technically literate users.
• Free as in “freedom”: the software license guarantees by law that users of the software must have access to the exact source code of the build of the software that they are using (without modification) regardless of whether or not you charge money for it so that your end users have the freedom to inspect whether the code is honest. It also guarantees that you have the freedom modify the source code however you please, but the license contract requires that you grant the same freedom to everyone else who is using your modified copy of the source code. “Free as in freedom” software protects the freedom (as in civil liberties) of anyone who uses it, open source does not.

The real outrage is big tech clouds like amazon taking open source software for free and bundling it up in AWS services that cost a lot of money.

If they would contribute back to the authors, they would become rich, but of course not…