I'm all for developers getting paid, but the thing with monetizing an open source project is:<p>If someone pays for your project, does the money belong exclusively to you as the project creator?<p>If the answer is "yes", you're literally making money off the effort of others without compensating them[1]; if the answer is "no":<p>* How do you decide how much should go to everyone else?<p>* Do you pay some percentage of what you earn to your dependencies? Only direct dependencies? When do you stop considering something a dependency (e.g. if you use a Linux distribution, do you donate to their maintainers as well)?<p>* Do you pay maintainers of your project?<p>* If you're not working actively in the project, but some devs are maintaining it, do you still get paid as the author? Or does "your share" go entirely to the maintainers?<p>* If some dev contributes one time, but it turns out to be a real important feature that becomes "core" because of how useful it turns out to be, do you pay them? Only once, or some part of your earnings?<p>* If someone forks your project, and you merge code from that fork, do you pay the author of the fork?<p>I'm not arguing for or against either position. I do what keeps my conscience clean.<p>I'm just trying to raise some questions that always come to my mind when the author of an open source project tries to get donations, or when they complain about others profiting off their project without donating anything[2].<p>[1] [2]: Notice the similarity between these two situations.