Give away your code, but never your time
Color me deeply skeptical of the suggestion to try to lock people out of community participation unless they pay.<p>The real secret to not burning out is to scale up the set of maintainers in proportion to the users. You do that by lowering the barriers to involvement, not raising them.<p>Most maintainers err on the side of controlling too much. Which makes them into bottlenecks.<p>One or two good PRs is enough for me to give you commit bit on my repos. This has never yet resulted in abuse, and has brought in a many helpful co-maintainers.<p>Bad commits can be easily reverted. Whereas giving people a bit of trust often inspires them to help more.