"My fundamental position is that paying people to work on open source is good, full stop, no exceptions. We need to stop criticizing maintainers getting paid, and start celebrating. Yes, all of the mechanisms are flawed in some way, but that’s because the world is flawed, and it’s not the fault of the people taking money. Yelling at maintainers who’ve found a way to make a living is wrong."

Strongly co-signed. Sure, I have a bias: around a decade of my career in total has been spent working directly on open source projects. But throughout doing that work, I encountered people who felt that because I was releasing my work in the open, I didn't have a right to earn a living. I reject that entirely.

I agree with every part of the argument presented in this post. If people can't be paid to work on open source, only people with disposable time and income will get to do so. The result is software that skews to people from wealthier demographics who don't have families, or that can't be sustainably maintained - and I don't think that's what we want at all.

There are people who say "we need universal basic income!" or "the solution is to get rid of money entirely!" and that's lovely, in a way, but people need to eat today, not just in some future post-capitalist version of the world. #Technology