this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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I wonder if he has a donation page. We need to get him some money.
I agree we should support him, but you know who should be more concerned with giving him and other open source maintainers money? The billion dollar corporations that rely on these critical projects and use them absolutely for free. Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, Google, Siemens, Motorola, God knows how many more.
We need more non profits who can set aside funds for these projects. It not like these companies don't want to help its just jot entirely clear how they can help.
They can help by donating some of their billions.
Sure. But if the project in question only has one or two donation methods and none of those are supported by the company, then the company can't easily donate anything. Companies usually have a strict way of how they can donate and it usually entails Paypal or some other costly solution, while projects like that likely just has a patreon or LibrePay option and perhaps a crypto wallet. Most companies can't work with that.
In my opinion it is a terrible choice for a company to rely on a dependency like XZ, especially maintained by one person as a hobby, without being able to meaningfully contribute to the maintenance themselves. I just don't think I can be sympathetic to a company having to maybe bend a rule or two to donate.
I'm sure many companies would if it wasn't just on individual
This is one of the problems, these companies and other groups just use a dependency maintained by one person (Lasse) without meaningfully contributing to its survival themselves.
We just need more non profits to manage projects. If a maintainer burns out they should be able to contact some organization to find help.