My name is Aasrith, and I’m a IB Career Path student conducting a research project on the ethics of open-source software commercialization. I’m specifically exploring whether companies have an ethical responsibility to contribute back when they monetize open-source projects.
I’m not asking for technical support — only short ethical perspectives from developers or contributors who are willing to share their views. Even 1–2 sentences would be incredibly helpful.
Any responses can remain anonymous and would be cited as personal communication for academic purposes only.
If you are also willing to complete a Microsoft form, please do as it would much more helpful for my project.
Please share your findings here when you have them!
Two remarks:
Question 8
When you utilize an open source software free of charge, do you ever consider the developers who build it without getting compensated?
Nowadays, most large open source projects do compensate their (core) developers. I think 80% of the Linux kernel devs is doing it from a paid job. Most devs on Discourse are on the payroll.
Question 12
Do you think that open source tools would still be able to grow if everyone acted like you (i.e., using without contributing)?
Assumes the person filling in the questionnaire does not give back?
I’m not on the payroll and one of the more prolific of plugin authors.
In my experience it is very hard to monetize plugin maintenance.
You can more easily get someone to pay for or sponsor the creation of a new plugin as a one off, but much harder to get someone to pay for the time for it’s ongoing fixes and support.
The biggest challenge is crowd-sourcing from the plugin users. You cannot make a living from voluntary donation.
Third party contribution to open source plugin repos is very unusual and most independent plugins are the work of one person.
It’s likely more straightforward for hosts like CDCK or Communiteq where clients are paying for hosting in any case and you can divert some of that revenue into plugin maintenance.
There is only one plugin (I’m aware of) that monetizes itself (Custom Wizard) outside of the major hosting companies. I co-wrote the infrastructure that was required to make that possible and the investment of time was significant.
I’m not sure whether I agree with that. I wrote private-replies, private-topics, dynamic-groups and quite some theme components to scratch my own itch, and I decided to open source them to give back to the community. I’ve also done maintenance on quite a lot of other plugins that weren’t mine in the past few years (if you have time, please check my PR for ratings ) , without any form of direct compensation.
The compensation is indirect: by contributing to the community, it will thrive, and we will all benefit.
In the question, mention if you are the type of person to give back or not, and then answer if open source tools will still be able to grow if everyone acted like you (give back or not).
