There is a difference between one-off bounties and continuous sponsorhips.
- Stable income vs. unplannable amount of bounties
- Bounties generally don't cover general maintenance work for a project (e.g. updating dependencies)
- Bounties (as they are implemented today) generally only pay the contributor, and not the maintainers, which can also have significant cost in reviewing a feature
- Bounties traditionally have been so disproportionally small compared to the work required that they don't come close to provide a reasonable hourly rate for contributors
(I think you'll find enough articles that go into more details on the difference between the two.)
Bounty platforms have been around for ages, and I don't know a single project that is able to finance itself from that. Even for the OBS example you mentioned, it the bounty was a good way to get the ball rolling on a specific issue, but the overall maintenance is still financed by monthly sponsoships.
One-off donations might be a nice supplement, but they don't form a solid foundation.
One issue is that donations implicitly promote a cost-plus pricing model (I'd like to earn 10k a year doing open source, so that's how many donations I need to fund me working on this).
Whereas something like dual-licensing promotes a value-based pricing model (our fortune 500 doesn't need to pay 5 engineers for a year to build and maintain this distributed system; we would happily pay equivalent of an engineer per year for that.)
What's the problem with a cost-plus pricing model? Having a solid ecosystem of cost-plus priced open source software would already be a great step up from the status quo.
Suppose a developer, let's call him Salvatore, lives in a modest apartment in, say Italy, and would live very comfortably indeed on three hundred thousand euros a year.
And let's say three cloud providers, call them, Jungle, Blue, and Lots, agree to give Salvatore a hundred thousand a year each to keep developing a, I don't know, a high-performance in-memory database. Lucky Salvatore, plenty of money for doing what he loves anyway.
Let's say that this database is quite good, and Jungle, Blue, and Lots each make a cool hundred million a year in pure profit renting out instances that run Salvatore's code.
So, whilst Salvatore has done perhaps better with the cost-plus model than he was before, he is capturing just 0.1% of the economic surplus that is being generated by his code.
And that is the problem in this scenario: if all elements of the value chain are cost-plus except one, that one element captures all of the surplus even though it may not be deserved.
The problem with this is that Redis isn't used because it is particularly good. It's used because everyone else uses it. And everyone else uses it because it's free.
If you tried to charge for Redis then "everyone else" would stop using it and pretty much all of the value disappears. It becomes a niche product that you shouldn't build on. You're vulnerable to high license fees and experienced developers become harder to find since few get experience with it.
Ok, and why do you think most people use Redis? Is it (1) they did a careful evaluation of the options and selected Redis because it was best or (2) everyone knows you use Redis if you need an in memory cache?
One size does not fit all. It's good that OSS exists, as is the case for public domain work.
But it's only natural that there is only so much goodwill in a person when their work is used by billion dollar companies that enrich a select few and can't even pay their employees fair wages, let alone share their success with those whose work it is built upon.
Making the source code available for everybody to see and use for derivative works under certain conditions like retaining authorship notices or keeping the same license (copyleft).
There are many varieties of this, some are more permissive than others. But this does not directly imply a certain business model.
Some people do donation-based development. And that's fine. And some people do things entirely for free, that's also fine. (But don't be angry that somebody then takes your code and does what the license you put it under permits them to do, e.g. not pay you.)
And others are corporations that have full-time employees write code and publish it as open source. See all the Red Hat work. Or Intels and others contributions to the Linux kernel.
Open source is more than the lone dev in their basement doing selfless acts and sometimes begging for donations.
