the role of money in open source
Maintainers of Open Source projects are often not payed to do it. Therefore, the projects rely on a voluntary contribution of time from groups of people who operate under very diverse believes. Nadia Eghbal explores the role of money in open source 1 by looking at some very specific cases:
- Companies fund open source to increase their image or to guarantee code quality and maintenance
- Companies pay for premium support (i.e. they pay for the attention of a developer, see: Maintenance costs of open source projects )
- Code can be released with dual-licenses, or some key features may be missing from the free version
- Individual donations to maintainers
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