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I've been paid, ONCE, for my open source work. I've been paid a lot a lot more times for consulting work (full time since 2018!). BUT: doing open source work (and being as helpful as I could be in those spaces!) was also how people found me to do consulting.

I WANT people to be able to do OSS full time. It would benefit a LOT of people AND companies. I have no idea how it gets done, consistently, in all the niches it deserves to be done in. I'm not saying it NEVER happens, but "it would be great if companies just did everyone a solid" isn't a good bet

Even the folks who have found ways to get paid (myself included!) did a LOT of "free" work to get to that place. That takes immense privilege and/or luck. I like having communities of folks that help each other. I don't know how to bridge that to "folks volunteering for critical infrastructure"

I think a big issue is maintainers being guilted into maintenance. This is a community issue. Entire communities, including Rust, have an assumption that an OSS project will be maintained. It would be better to assume OSS is provided as is, no warranties. This is a community issue.

The flip side of this is taking offense, or considering that you "failed" if your project got forked. Forking should be done freely to add your own modifications to the software without having to go via upstream.

Yeah! I think that totally agrees with what I said down thread. A huge of it is "expectation mismatch", between: * how it actually is today * how we want it to be at some point in the future (ideological or temporal or aspirational mismatch) * how it could be intentionally misunderstood to be