It's in the tech news a lot these days that there are 'problems' with free and open source maintenance. I put 'problems' in quotes because the issue is mostly that FOSS maintenance isn't happening as fast or as much as the people who've come to depend on it would like , and the people who maintain FOSS are increasingly saying 'no' when corporations turn up ( cf , also ). But even with all the corporate presence, there are still a reasonable number of people who use non-corporate FOSS operating systems like Debian Linux, FreeBSD, and so on, and they too suffer when parts of the FOSS software stack struggle with maintenance. Every so often, people will suggest that the problem would be solved if only corporations would properly fund this maintenance work. However, I don't believe this can actually work even in a world where corporations are willing to properly fund such things (in this world, they're very clearly not).

One big problem with 'funding' as a solution to the FOSS maintenance problems is that for many FOSS maintainers, there isn't enough work available to support them. Many FOSS people write and support only a small number of things that don't necessarily need much active development and bug fixing (people have done studies on this), and so can't feasibly provide full time employment (especially at something equivalent to a competitive salary). Certainly,there's plenty of large projects that are underfunded and could support one or more people working on them full time, but there's also a long tail of smaller, less obvious dependencies that are also important for various sorts of maintenance.

(In a way, the lack of funding pushes people toward small projects. With no funding, you have to do your projects in your spare time and the easiest way to make that work is to choose some small area or modest project that simply doesn't need that much time to develop or maintain.)

There are models where people who work on FOSS can be funded to do a bit of work on a lot of projects. But that's not the same as having funding to work full time on your own little project (or set of little projects). It's much more like regular work, in that you're being paid to do development work on other people's stuff (and I suspect that it will be much more time consuming than one might expect, since anyone doing this will have to come up to speed on a whole bunch of projects).

(I'm assuming the FOSS funding equivalent of a perfectly spherical frictionless object from physics examples, so we can wave away all other issues except that there is not enough work on individual projects. In the real world there are a huge host of additional problems with funding people for FOSS work that create significant extra friction (eg, potential liabilities ).)

PS: Even though we can't solve the whole problem with funding, companies absolutely should be trying to use funding to solve as much of it as possible. That they manifestly aren't is one of many things that is probably going to bring everything down as pressure builds to do something .

(I'm sure I'm far from the first person to write about this issue with funding FOSS work. I just feel like writing it down myself, partly as elaboration on some parts of past Fediverse posts .)

Sidebar: It's full time work that matters

If someone is already working a regular full time job, their spare time is a limited resource and there are many claims on it. For various reasons, not everyone will take money to spend (potentially) most of their spare time maintaining their FOSS work. Many people will only be willing to spend a limited amount of their spare time on FOSS stuff, even if you could fund them at reasonable rates for all of their spare time. The only way to really get 'enough' time is to fund people to work full time, so their FOSS work replaces their regular full time job.

One of the reasons I suspect some people won't take money for their extra time is that they already have one job and they don't want to effectively get a second one. They do FOSS work deliberately because it's a break from 'job' style work.

(This points to another, bigger issue; there are plenty of people doing all sorts of hobbies, such as photography, who have no desire to 'go pro' in their hobby no matter how avid and good they are. I suspect there are people writing and maintaining important FOSS software who similarly have no desire to 'go pro' with their software maintenance.)