Financial support for open source projects
You may have heard the saying that open source is “free as in speech, not free as in beer.” The free part of open source is the freedom of what you can do with the code, more than the cost of development or ownership being free. There is an economic cost to developing software, open source or proprietary, and that cost has to be borne by someone.
Too often that cost in open source is borne by the maintainer, as they give their time and energy to running an open source project that is used broadly. An xkcd comic (https://xkcd.com/2347/) provides a great illustration of this problem; modern applications stacks have so many dependencies, and a dependency quickly can become a critical one without people realizing how taxing it is on the maintainer.
We will explore more in Chapter 7, Growing Contributors to Maintainers, Chapter 9, Handling Growth, and Chapter 10, Commercialization of Open Source, including the nuances and tensions...
