Challenges to funding open source · Alex Gaynor
Hi, I'm Alex. I'm a software resilience engineer. I care about building systems that work. I've worked for the government, in the private sector, and on open source. I'm based in Washington, DC.
I’ve had the good fortune to get paid to write open source as part of my job several times. For more than 15 years, I’ve also done a lot of open source development in my free time as a volunteer. Along the way, there’s been a fairly constant refrain that it’d be better if more open source maintainers were paid to maintain their projects. And I’ve seen a lot of ideas for how that could happen. While some of these ideas were successful, many more were not. I’m writing this post to explain three reasons that I’ve seen open source funding concepts fail. These aren’t the only reasons, but they’re reasons that I think are often ignored in the discourse.
This is not a normative piece, I’m not expressing an opinion on if anything here is good or bad. This is entirely descriptive of the things I have seen.
