In expensive, highly profitable commercial products, this boils my blood off. If you use OSS, show some damn gratitude and give'em a small part of you big income.
It's even simpler, in my opinion: if you eat from a pond, make sure the life in it is sustainable; don't count on draining it yourself and moving on before anyone else notices.
Just an example: Years of maintaining/developing the STM32 soldering firmware, helping in the forums because lazy people doesn't RTFM...
I can see the traffic in Github, about 500-900 visits a day and 60-100 unique visitors.
Hey please fix this. Please add this, please help me.
I can count the entire donations with my two hands.
Want support? Sure!
Exactly. And conversely, if you get the right people the monetary support they need, they can dominate an entire niche.
The problem is that companies and organizations that throw that kind of money around, simply don't have the technical ability or knowledge to pick well. It is either done at a personal level, or via social interactions. You never get funded because you're the best around; you only get funded if you get a people-person to promote your work and convince the money-bags it is the right thing to do.
And this is how we end up with something else than a meritocracy in the support of free/open source projects.
If it matters, it is the exact same thing in scientific research. It is much easier to get funding for research already being done elsewhere, because those are proven popular, and thus low-risk to those who decide who and what gets funded. The science itself does not matter that much anymore. Even in industry, a single eccentric billionaire can revolutionize an entire industrial field, if they simply break out from that mold.
Yes. Yes.
The root issue (I think I mentioned that before) is that we humans are an ultra-social species and, apart from exceptions, we need conformity to "fit in". Probably because conformity has helped the species as a whole to survive and build "consistent" cultures. Social animal species everywhere have shown that, beyond us, this appears to be a working model.
Great discoveries and breakthroughs have pretty much always come from people breaking the mold, even when obviously they have always built on previous knowledge. Still, to break through, at some point you need individuals that, at least momentarily, will get out of conformity and accept that.
And with the advent of new technologies, AI and so on, this conformity we still seem to need as much (if probably even more) as we did in the stone age is, IMHO, dragging us down and may eventually lead to our demise.
This "AI" we'll be increasingly relying on is essentially an hyper-extension of this conformity of our societies. It's going to build ultra-conformity.
Speaking of the state of scientific research, this has become a complete disaster. Not new. I started to notice the trend a good 15 years ago, but it's getting worse every year.
As to eccentric billionaires, yeah. Even if a small minority, I actually think there are many "eccentric" people out there, potentially able to break the mold.
But when they're not billionaires, they have to constantly take care of making just enough money to survive (the "rat race"), which, I think, is wasting their potential. Not that I have a solution to that.
