Corporations and OSS Do Not Mix
In 15 years, I've read my fair share of "open source developer's lament", and when the projects mentioned are stuff like Requests or SQLObject I honestly don't understand. If you step back and try to look at these problems in a structured way, you can see that it always boil down to the following algo:<p>1. Is it a money problem? Then <i>ask for money</i> every time anyone asks for a piece of you (i.e. bug fixing, event patronage, whatever).<p>2. Is is a time problem? Then hire someone. If you can't afford it, it's a money problem: goto 1.<p>3. Is it a skills problem? Then hire someone. If you can't afford it, it's a money problem: goto 1.<p>I mean, <i>requests</i> alone is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. with all due respect to Kenneth and Ian, I find it hard to believe that it cannot pay one developer salary, even at Californian rates, unless they simply <i>cannot be bothered to ask for money</i>. Stuff like adding a "donate" button on the page looks <i>lazy</i>.<p>There are tons of ways to get money out of big corporations. Get a rotating-sponsorship deal where a company pays one salary for one year -- between Amazon, Google and Twitter (all heavy requests users, I'm sure), you already have three years of <i>full-time development</i>. They get quick bugfixes, you get a better life, win-win. These companies make <i>billions</i> with your code, I cannot believe they can't cough up some spare cash. I mean, look at the OpenBSD Foundation: they asked for some change to pay a month of server time, and they got <i>Microsoft</i> to dole out huge cash to port OpenSSH to Windows. <i>Microsoft</i>, FFS!