> Existing open source funding models don't work for small projects.
Is this true? It seems to me that open source small projects flourish and continue to grow [0]. Although, oddly, I can’t find a simple chart of python or npm packages added over time, I expect it is.
Since the article is based on a seemingly false premise, it’s hard to consider the rest of the article.
Everyone speaks their own idiolect, and it appears you have used your idiolect to interpret “Existing open source funding models don't work for small projects.” I suggest putting more effort into guessing what the author might mean before writing off the article with snark. After reading the article, I think it’s clear the author was referring to small projects being able to receive funds.
That page argues (convincingly!) that open source is growing faster and faster in terms of contributors, projects, commits, etc. This is definitely the case, despite the fact that the funding problem is unsolved. But who knows how much faster OSS would be growing if it was solved?
> But who knows how much faster OSS would be growing if it was solved?
Not just how much faster it would grow, but how much existing projects would improve. Maintainer burnout is real, and I think that OSS would benefit a lot from long-term maintenance being encouraged by even a few dollars a year.
Even $3/year would make OSS maintenance a lot more fulfilling for me personally, because that $3 shows that I'm actually helping people.
I think there are challenges with how to make money from open source projects, but that is very different than “ Existing open source funding models don't work for small projects.”
I think the fundamental funding model seems to work well based on the number and rate of growth in small projects- philanthropy. The vast majority of small projects don’t require funding because their authors donate their time and code produced.
This seems to work really well based on how many people do it.
Perhaps more would do it if there was funding, perhaps less. We do have a large commercial software industry and they have a pretty figured out model.
One of the projects I had in mind when writing this post is the "color" module on npm. It's a fantastic utility for reading in colors in different formats (hex, decimal, CMYK), applying transformations, and getting a modified color back (in your format of choice).
For all intents and purposes this module is "done". It's extremely mature and has already implemented everything it set out to do. It has 3.3k stars and 8M monthly downloads.
When I look at your list of proposals, none of them really apply to "color". The projects you have in your head are big, ambitious projects, not the smaller utility projects I describe in the article.
Is this true? It seems to me that open source small projects flourish and continue to grow [0]. Although, oddly, I can’t find a simple chart of python or npm packages added over time, I expect it is.
Since the article is based on a seemingly false premise, it’s hard to consider the rest of the article.
[0] https://octoverse.github.com/