this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Free and Open Source Software
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I did back of the envelope math a while back where if active users of large self-hosted communities (such as /r/selfhosted) put $5/month into donations to the most used self-hosted software projects, ~20 projects could get ~$75,000/year of income. Not enough to build a company around, but enough to live well on in many parts of the world as a sole developer or enough for a maintainer to pay for other developer contribution.
I think the open source community fails to organize around the fact that development and maintenance isn't free, but that as a massive user group, it takes minimal contribution from each to make an impact. Can better messaging and "structure" break the free rider problem?
What you are looking for is some sort of variant of quadratic funding. It is a mechanism that is specifically designed to overcome the free rider problem that public goods like FOSS suffer from. It solves it by matching private contributions to these public goods using a special formula that aligns incentives, so that everyone that knowingly benefits from a public good has an economic incentive to contribute to it because more contributors leads to a higher level of matching