Open source takes continued investment, and that must be subsidized somehow
People underestimate how difficult it is to create a popular open source project. It&#x27;s very competitive. You&#x27;re competing not just with other open source projects but also with SaaS solutions from well-funded companies; and you have to compete with a $0 marketing budget.<p>Also, if the project does become popular eventually (which is very unlikely), maintenance is a lot of work. To make matters worse, there is a general tendency that if things go wrong, the community will blame you but if things go well, you get almost no credit.<p>Even if your project has several thousands of stars on GitHub, it means nothing financially. Most of these OSS authors can&#x27;t afford to quit their day job even though their project may be generating millions of dollars of value for other people.<p>Money is an important topic to open source authors because after a decade of working for free during nights and weekends, most of them would love to be able to afford to quit their day jobs to focus exclusively on their projects but they can&#x27;t do that; they&#x27;re tired but they have to keep soldiering on with the 80+ hour work week.<p>Being an open source author is not a wise life decision right now. I think that any business innovation which helps keep open source projects going should be welcome.