The first time somebody demands I pay extra to fix a bug is the last time I use that project.

"Pay extra"? Like you were paying for it in the first place. At the end of the day, somebody gotta pay the ramen. Besides, a certain project you might be familiar with is basically monetizing automated security patching, so throwing stones is really not a great sport.

(also, projects like requests are not desperate for users. One user paying to contribute to the well-being of the codebase is worth hundreds of users who won't even bother sending in a patch. Again, a certain project you might be familiar with is awfully aware of this state of things.)

The problem with the "pay them to fix the bugs" model is that it turns bugs into a source of revenue and creates the wrong incentive for the developer.

I'm much more inclined to agree to a "pay for additional features" model instead. Because then, by definition, you are paying for extra stuff, vs. fixing what should have been working correctly in the first place.

That's clever but wrong here: labor is what's being monetized. The people that they're asking probably require payment for their own labor and pay others w.r.t. other goods. Then, they OSS developers owe them free products and support of highest quality.

Quite a double standard. Requiring pay for fixes only incentivizes pay for labor, which is rare for OSS.

I think this applies more to companies requesting bugfixes as well as their scale and scope. For me at least, I don't mind fixing bugs in my projects if some random person is having trouble; heck that can be fun many times. On the other hand, a company using my project requesting that I drop everything and fix a bug that's only a problem for them? Seems perfectly reasonable to say "sure, it'll be 300$/hr" or whatever a reasonable rate might be.

This is of course all a hypothetical though, since I don't have any projects that more than like 5 people use and I have to hold them at gunpoint to get them to submit a bug report T_T.

Sure, and the first time someone insists that you triage a bugfix based on their priorities and not yours and they don't contribute to the project, you can let them leave as a user! Everybody is happy[1].

1) Nobody is actually happy.

Why?

You are getting huge use value out of the project. And the real life blood of this OSS thing is the idea that the use value of the body of OSS software is greater than whatever got put into it in the first place.

So we all scratch that itch, and together we get the shared use value.

If people are investing very significant amounts of their time in the projects, that takes away from something they could be doing to make money, does it not?

We only have so many waking hours each day, and we all need to eat too.

So you submit the bug, and you get the answer, "thanks" and I'll put it on the list. Submitting the bug is a nice contribution. They need to be found. Creating documentation is a nice contribution. Teaching others how to use the OSS is a nice contribution too.

Lots of ways to give back, but it really only works out when we are, in fact, giving back. Or more precisely, enough of us are giving back for the ongoing improvements to make sense.

Now, you are going to think, "when will that be fixed?"

Could be never! Could be next year. Most likely, it's "when time permits" and eating might get in the way of that time too.

So you can wait it out, and hope somebody somewhere finds it worth it to scratch that itch. Or you yourself could go get it done and send a patch.

But what if you need it now? Funding that effort clearly has a value to you, and they do need to eat.

That money may well result in, "yeah, no problem. I can get this in a week."

Hmm? Their time is valuable. You are being asked to pay for their time.

If there's a broken traffic light in the city, do you expect some workers to come and spend their time fixing it just because it's broken and it's a good thing to do, or do you expect them to get paid to do it?

Now, one could argue that fixing bugs in open source software is a public good, like the traffic lights in a city. So maybe the government should pay for it? Well, I could perhaps buy that argument, but getting increased public funding for that sort of thing is likely to be hard, and it's hard to tell where that money is best spent.

But certain fixes, or new features, will help some people a lot more than others. If you would benefit from a particular bugfix, and someone else will need to do work for it, why not they ask you for money to fix it?

I assume then that you work for no pay, give away everything you create, and make no errors at all.

(For OpenBSD in particular.)