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Comment by ironmagma | Hacker News Reader

As much as I want open source software to be good, commercial software has the inherent advantage of having hierarchies and teams that are all powered by compensation. We could really use some kind of platform in the open source community built around (a) making it easy to fund projects, AND (b) making those projects organizable, with a team lead and contributors.

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Counterpoint to that, all the tools I use most often and am most delighted by are published under a GPL or other FOSS license (Bash, Linux, Emacs, Firefox, Inkscape, etc) whereas the ones I am most constantly frustrated by, angry at, and find the most fault with are closed source proprietary company developed (Anything that starts with MS, VMWare Fusion, etc)

Firefox is developed by a company with hierarchies. Those other ones have the advantage of being very old and lots of time to iterate on them. Open source produces lots of gems, the problem is that it is very slow moving and IMO the effectiveness is cut in 10 by duplication of effort and lack of coordination. For every successful open source project, there are about 20 stubs and 5-10 less successful open source programs that do basically the same thing.

Agreed. Hierarchies are an advantage only if the people on top of the hierarchy are either unusually right or unusually good at hiring and deferring to people who know better than they do.

Big questions: Who pays for credit processing, auditing etc.? One platform or many? Are the managing people allowed to make a profit? How do you ensure that important but boring projects get money as well?

See the ubuntu software store, elementary OS, patreon/liberapay, ....

Edit: Also "commercial" is the wrong word. You mean proprietary. You are very much encouraged to sell free software https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

If you sell the software, you could in theory form a team with hired individuals, etc. It’s not proprietary software that has some advantage; the act of keeping the source proprietary does nothing to help with logistics of development, that’s what charging money does.

As for the questions, I don’t have the solution, I am limited to knowing what the problems are unfortunately.

"(a) making it easy to fund projects" I don't know how it is in the US, but in EU you need a regular invoice for a business expense. So if a company wants to support an open-source project today, they need an invoice from the authors. Now try to get this from the author of your favorite GitHub open-source library... And for large corporations you need to get a quote / an offer so that a business decision may be made and budget may get allocated... Now try to get an offer from the author...

Pretty sure https://www.tidelift.com/ can invoice you.

Upd: GH has announced they can do too https://github.blog/2020-12-08-new-from-universe-2020-dark-m... "Starting today, investing in open source is as easy as just adding it to your GitHub bill!"

At one one place I work we successfully contracted the authors of random GitHub projects to add features we needed, so it is definitely doable. I've also had companies/folks contact me randomly about improvements to open source projects I've worked on. For larger projects there are usually lots of consulting companies able to do that too.

What about non-profit organizations, donations, charity funds? I doubt that there is absolutely no way for EU based companies and people to support open source projects snd teams behind them

In my country a company can legally donate if: a) organization is on a list of approved non-profit organizations or b) you sign a contract with organization where the purpose of donations is clearly defined. Usually authors of open-source projects are not "approved non-profits" so you must have a contract with them...

If you think authority and hierarchy is the way to go then there’s nothing wrong with proprietary software (both the product and how it is produced).

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