The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

beSpacific 2019-09-17

Medium – Who should be responsible for maintaining and troubleshooting open-source projects? – “…It’s hard to demand that programmers who are working for free troubleshoot problems or continue to maintain software that they’ve lost interest in for whatever reason — though some companies certainly try. Not adequately maintaining these projects, on the other hand, makes the entire tech ecosystem weaker. So some open-source programmers are asking companies to pay, not for their code, but for their support services…Many in the open-source community are opposed to the idea that they should be paid in any way, which remains a controversial topic. Some in the open-source community believe that monetization defeats the purpose of “free” — but the reality is that the people working for free need to eat and feed families, just like everyone else.