Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes: >One solution that anyone in open source software communities has heard about >for decades now is to turn open source software maintenance into a job with a >paycheck. Then it doesn't necessarily have to be fun
It can still be fun, and in some cases more fun than pure open-source. Consider the difference between "we have a practical real-world problem that we need solved, there's real-world demand for it, we can describe it in detail, and we'll pay you to solve it" (commercial user) vs "i have some me- only feature that I want you to add to your code just for me and I'll whine endlessly on Github/Discord/whatever if you don't" (open-source). That's an extreme for illustrative purposes, but with commercial users you've got direction and focus while with open-source you've got a kind of free-for-all where people want this and hack in that unless you have a strong benevolent- dictator model or small group of maintainers who screen everything to keep the codebase stable and bells and whistles to a minimum. Peter.
