I agree with this 100%. When you sit down and think about it, there are a lot of major projects used all over the world with just a few developers working on it, volunteering their time.
I would also love nothing more than to work on my open source project (OctoberCMS) full time too, but gotta pay the bills somehow.
Go to any play or recital, and the program will have an entire page devoted to donations -- big companies up at the Platinum level, medium companies and rich folks at the Gold level, on down to random folks at the $0-50 level. Until you get up to the Hollywood movie / arena rock level, art always operates at a loss.
Hospitals and universities also frequently have wealthy patrons. I'm sure there are other fields, too, that I'm forgetting or don't know about.
Solving this problem for the field of software would be very cool, and it's always a great idea to start with one particular domain. The big picture remains: how can people continue to do good and worthwhile work, when the economics aren't on their side?
I know many people doing work they hate, and which isn't in any way worthwhile, just to pay their bills. When I was younger, I worked for 2 years on a "death march project" that never shipped. I was young enough to not realize that I couldn't make a difference. The older and more cynical people knew all along it would never ship. The Invisible Hand can't always deal with the complexities of modern life.
I'm not even convinced that money is part of the answer. I don't care about money, except in that I need it to pay taxes, rent, health care, and so on. Maybe I watched too much Star Trek as a kid, but it feels like a post-scarcity world shouldn't require citizens to worry about cash, unless they want to do something especially extravagant.
>I don't care about money, except in that I need it to pay taxes, rent, health care, and so on.
I do care about money: not only do I need it to pay rent, healthcare, (not taxes, that's just a portion of your income, so no income = no taxes) etc., but I also need to it buy things I enjoy and to enrich my life: foreign travel, for instance, costs money. If I had to sit around my apartment for the rest of my life because I couldn't afford to travel anywhere, my life would not be worth living.
Instead of being dishearted, propose a solution to enable the ability to make a living. First thing that popped into my head was some sort of support model. CentOS vs RHEL. Give the farm away for free but consult how to run the farm...
Your farm has to be complex enough to need help using it. You either have to make an absolutely massive farm or intentionally make it hard to use/maintain.
You would think that at least one big company finds it in their interest to make sure the product is bug-free, at least enough to compensate core FOSS devs for their time.
It's a problem similar to the tragedy of the commons - why should I pay for something when company X, my competitor to boot, would not only benefit but clearly has more money/uses the software more/whatever other reason I feel justifies washing my hands of it.
Yes this is one of the two obvious potential solutions for that particular project (the other being a hosting service) but transitioning from open source project to open source company can be challenging!
@irishcoffee: “Instead of being dishearted, propose a solution to enable the ability to make a living. First thing that popped into my head was some sort of support model. CentOS vs RHEL. Give the farm away for free but consult how to run the farm...”
Seems perfectly reasonable to me, who down voted this and why?
Because it's so trite and obvious.. Oh really, support, geez why didn't I think of that? This discussion has been going on for 20+ years and the conclusion is simple: OS is not a viable business model in the vast majority of cases, and certainly not for those who only want to sit in their basements coding. Want to make money from software? Charge for it.
I think the vast majority of people who want to make money building software don't start off by finishing a product and then trying to sell it. A much more common scenario is building software for someone from the start (or building a service, but let's focus on "pure software" for now). In that case the developers are paid for time spent, not copies licenced, so using a FLOSS licence isn't a roadblock for making money.
I would also love nothing more than to work on my open source project (OctoberCMS) full time too, but gotta pay the bills somehow.