Remy Says OSS Devs should not just EXPECT Money

Hey Chris, Mike,

Regarding the core-js maintainer's plea for money. I'm the biggest supporter for open source, preferably (A)GPL (to make sure everybody contributes back, as opposed to those BSD/MIT style licenses). All of my software is open source, even my own paid app (which I've sent in earlier, https://www.leafnode.nl/). By love for the GPL might come near that of RMS.

But!

If you choose an open source license for your software, you cannot expect people to pay. That is not part of the license. It is allowed, but specifically making the software open source means that the only thing you expect is that the source remains open / available. Not that you get any form of compensation for it.

Now, I'm not saying the guy isn't in a shitty situation. I'm not saying that open source maintainers on which multi-billion dollar corps depend shouldn't be compensated. I'm also not saying that we have a good system currently of doing that. Github sponsors, patreon or advertisements aren't the way to go. (I sadly also don't know of a better solution. Go work for $bigcorp but let them basically pay you to work on your open source thing is one of the better solutions. The cURL guy (Daniël Stenberg) does that I think, now at WolfSSL. Or Linus.

The point I want to make is the differentiation between open source licenses and getting paid as a developer / dependency provider. Those are totally unrelated, IMHO. By choosing an open source license for your software you make it even harder for yourself to be compensated.

One other unrelated question for Mike, as the host of the 30-something dad podcast, which is the category of listeners I fall into nowdays. How the h-e-double-hockeysticks do you have time to play MTG, even go to tournaments / casual group plays, manage a business, take care of yourself, the wife and 2 kids? I barely get along doing one or two of the above points, let alone have some spare time for a game here and there?

Cheers,
Remy