this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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The maintainer is a human that needs to eat every day, and not just whenever their services are needed. So at least, the sum of money would need to be a few times higher than whatever labour the fix takes.
But then, the maintainer's ability to fix these bugs doesn't come from nowhere. They worked on this project for likely a long time, which would also need to be taken into account when agreeing on a sum.
Further, this would be business to business. And those contracts often include the value that the client gets out of the software. So if Microsoft makes billions from this open source library, then the maintainer's - as a business - should receive a payment that reflects this for the fix.
All that implies that a few thousand is not nearly enough. Maybe 100k and the maintainer would budge.
That's perfectly fine.
But the maintainer is indeed explicitly making his work available to the public for free and without any expectation of retribution of any kind, isn't it?
And this isn't exactly something new or recent or novel, right? That's been going on for many years.
What changed? Did anything changed at all, even?
Microsoft is no longer able to outcompete the Free Software commons. That's all.
You might want to re-read the thread and think about how you sound, by the way. You're coming off as a concern troll, not as a member of the Free Software community.