I think those who believe a companies will pay to you for a random OSS is just a kids. Ask people who can use a sheets, they explain you why your product will die with this approach.
No one owes anything to any particular project or developer.
The thing to understand about discussions around funding FOSS projects is that it should be clear that society as a whole would benefit immensely from a strategic investment in commons-based software infrastructure.
A society would owe something to person picking up trash in their free time. But I am pretty sure society will never end up paying even minimum wage for that labour...
It is similar to open source... Something has value and is good for society, but society neither has willingness or ways to reward it.
Where I live in Seattle we fund keeping the streets in good condition. I see city staff roaming around during the day from time to time wearing hi-vis, doing stuff like picking up trash or removing graffiti.
If trash is lying around only getting picked up by generous citizens in their spare time, what that implies is that the city/county have chosen not to invest in maintaining the streets, and the citizens have elected to throw trash everywhere. I don't think we should take either of those conditions as a given. Better things are possible.
Quite interesting that I didn't mention money, but that seems to be the only language many people speak. Anyway, maybe go ask the Blender folks (and I'm quite sure others can provide some more examples)
Also, please read the HN guidelines [0]
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
You don't know anything about me, including my age, nor my motivations or history.
sure. But companies believe that open source developers owe everything to the them (i.e. fixing bugs, contributing to feature requests, critical security releases ...).
I believe, once in deep future, an open source developers will grown and stop repeating this sectarian mantra.
No one owes you anything. If you do opensource and you need in money - use your open source as marketing tool to promote services you sell.
It's simple as 2+2, I've mention it in my blog post https://vitonsky.net/blog/2025/06/24/open-source/
I think those who believe a companies will pay to you for a random OSS is just a kids. Ask people who can use a sheets, they explain you why your product will die with this approach.