I think the developers generally understand that. No sensible person goes into FOSS for the money. It's the customers - consuming non-developers - who have a problem of expectations.
well, going FOSS can be an effective marketing strategy: by making something open and free (in both meanings) you get much higher probability of that something becoming popular. That in turn gives a lot new opportunities to sell complementary something or other something. This is best case scenario though, and you need to have resources/other sources of income for the time it needs to get widely adopted and popular (or the very possibility that it will not happen at all)
Right, and then people try to do that, fail to sell whatever it is that they thought they would, and end up putting some sort of annoyance on the code to punish those who are using it.
Really the only thing that might work is if there was broad community acceptance of not changing all the lower parts of the software stack all the time so the maintenance burden is lower.
Honestly; if we were interested in what was good for FOSS all that needs to happen is that hardware stops improving all the time. Then everyone can calm down, declare things finished and move on without requirements changing. The Linux graphic system (c.f. Xorg v. Wayland) still hasn't finished adjusting to graphics cards. That sort of change is bad for FOSS.
In a sense, this sort of thing is what is being showcased here. The breaking changes to FUSE are probably going to be linked to design changes in Catalina triggered by RAM/CPU/Network changes and the RPM/SSD transition that has been going on for however long. When that sort of thing subsides in 50 years there is going to be this amazing FOSS renaissance as working things stop breaking because of hardware changes and the balance really tilts towards free & available software.
Here's my "get off my lawn" perspective: those developers who remember a world where there was little or no free software (from, say, the mid-1980's, when Sun made the C compiler a for-cost option on SunOS through until commercial Linux distributions), have a visceral understanding of free software that those who came to it later, and (perhaps understandably) take it for granted, don't have.
Free software is a commons. In a healthy community, people pitch in to help, and maintainers become overwhelmed by the scale of activity, not because they've been left alone to support many users by themselves for years.
There are some efforts to address it (eg. SSL, Mongo, etc), but they're the first "drafts" if you like.
When a majority of the users of free software were programmers themselves, things were quite different to today. The world has changed, but the free software model has not kept pace.
With hindsight, I think the "Open Source" definition can be seen as a turning point, and the issues we have today stem from the decisions to give everyone the use of free software, even those who aren't of the community, or able to contribute in turn.
I don't think that was a bad or wrong decision, but I think that the ramifications are still playing out.
It's entirely because many of these projects are run by professional software developers, not professional managers. So many projects with single maintainers are that way because the maintainer feels a sense of ownership rather than a sense of stewardship.
It's not to say that solo maintainers are bad people; just that the jobs of writing software and coordinating software development require different, non-overlapping skill sets.
If you are going to mention ChromeOS or Android, ChromeOS is hardly a blip outside US school system, and what kernel is being used on Android is irrelevant to user space, there is Fuschia on the horizon and Google has been replacing everything, with the Linux kernel being the last piece of GPL code standing.
Then if you mean embedded, plenty of IoT OS are MIT based and even Linux Foundation now has Zephyr as alternative to Linux, all operating systems where OEM can profit without giving anything back.
If you mean compilers, plenty of embedded OEMs are now happy LLVM users free of contributions, while reducing their development costs.
Compared to what knowledge of how good it could be if we had a more sustainable model than hoping someone has the charity or hobby to work on something we need for free?
This reminds me of when gamers assert how game modding has done fine so far limited to just labors of love and weekend hobbyism. Though I'm sure gamers are more coming from an angle of not wanting to pay for anything, we can only imagine the gaming mods we'd have if we had more of a culture around allowing people to work full-time on things we enjoy instead of only waiting for the few hobbyists with the masochism or compulsion to do it.
SOME of it is, sure. The big successful projects.
But what about the rest of it?
I don't think that's a problem for FOSS, it's a problem (if you call it such) of the economic system that we live under.
Generally the only realistic answer to that for most people at an individual level is to focus on financial security so that you don't have to care about that sort of fluff.
Most people can't. That's how our world works. In the general case creatives earn effectively nothing and only a few blockbuster individuals 'make it', regardless of the field; and usually they have to go proprietary to some extent.
You're definitely right about this for folks who are barely scraping by, working multiple jobs, etc.
But for folks in IT, taking the time to read and comment on HN... we make the time for what we choose to make the time for.
If FOSS zealotry wasn't a thing, then said expectations would be unreasonable. Sadly we live in a world where many people can withstand the cognitive dissonance of "You should use FOSS" and "You shouldn't complain about it because it is free".