> Donating to someone's Patreon does NOT improve the stability of a product

Saying this more forcibly doesn't make it true. Demonstrably, a bunch of people's stuff broke because log4j was underfunded. You can't claim with such certainty that funding Open Source doesn't make products more stable after a bunch of companies just had a bunch of critical severity bugs because the project wasn't funded and didn't have enough eyes on it. That's a wild thing to say.

"Locking doors doesn't deter criminals, so our investors aren't going to pay for locks at my business", as you actively watch masked thieves walk out of your office building holding a flat-screen TV. Come on. :)

On the other hand, if it doesn't impact corporate profits, if Open Source stability isn't affecting businesses, then corporations can stop complaining about Open Source bugs, and we can all stop having these hot takes. But I think the reason we have these hot takes coming out corporate mouths is because they recognize that bugs do impact stability and they're interested in trying to make that into someone else's problem.

> You need to understand. That's what you need to do.

See, this is the thing though, I and the Open Source community don't need to understand this. The point I'm making here is that the log4j developers were not affected by this bug, it wasn't their stuff that was on fire, and nobody had a contract with them forcing them to care. Donating something to a company is not an obligation to service that thing.

Nor would it be "irresponsible" for the log4j maintainers to leave companies in that state. The Open Source community could just ignore all of this. The Open Source community doesn't benefit from Minecraft using their stuff for free, the Open Source community could turn over and go back to bed when people start panicking about Minecraft bugs. The Open Source community does not need to worry about anything other than the Open Source community, it is an act of both social and personal charity that people release code under permissive licenses, and doing so does not open them up to any additional obligation for support or any additional responsibility to guarantee stability.

If you want that support, then pay for it. And if you're not willing to pay for it, then fine, but then don't complain or expect sympathy from the Open Source community if your stuff breaks.

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> My understanding is your position is that Open Source isn't broken, it's all the free riding that's the problem.

My position is not that free riding is the problem, free riding is a big part of Open Source, free riding is fine. My position is twofold:

- First, when you give someone something for free, and they come back with additional demands or complaints that it doesn't work as well as they want it to because they're not engaged in support -- it's not your problem or your job to devote additional work to making it easier for them free ride.

- Second, that at a systemic level people giving stuff away for free does not give them some kind of additional obligation to individually overthrow Capitalism or rework our entire economic system, and I think it's wild to look at arguably one of the most successful Anarchist spaces in the entire modern world and say, "it's not the businesses that are the problem, it's these people, because they haven't done enough to overthrow the entire tech industry."

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You seem to be dipping your toes into a very cynical take on the tech industry that I'm not going to argue for or against. What I am going to say is that if I take your position, if I assume that the tech industry doesn't care about stability at all, that it only cares about rapid growth, that security vulnerabilities are acceptable to investors, that this all and elaborate shell game to monopolize and undercut competitors and choke down on the market and its workers -- from that perspective, it makes even less sense for us to have an earnest conversation about how Open Source can become more "professional" or how it can encourage companies to give back.

If I start from your view of the tech industry, then I am even more convinced that Open Source bears no obligation to these companies and that it's fine for the Open Source community to go off and do its own things and leave them to figure out their own problems. It doesn't make sense to have such a cynical view of how companies work, and then to say that Open Source developers are now somehow responsible for cleaning up this mess that companies caused. You seem very cynical about the potential stability of corporate products in general; but if they're so fundamentally broken then why not let them break?

It is a very strange philosophy for you to have where you're pointing at corporations and investor mentality as a fundamentally broken system, and then saying that Open Source devs are being irresponsible because they're somehow "enabling" these people. If someone sets out a bowl of Halloween candy and some kid comes up and takes the entire bowl, who is the primary person that you blame in that situation?

But sure, whatever. If I understand you, the central problem is that free riding is baked into our industry, and yet somehow it's individual unpaid developers building software outside of that profit-maximizing system that are to blame for all of it. So instead of holding companies to task, or trying to support the people building commons that aren't designed to monopolize or grow at all costs, or reworking economic systems to improve incentives, or even just acknowledging that Open Source devs don't have an obligation to support the industry, what we should actually do instead is criticize the Open Source community for not being itself Capitalistic enough. That will definitely help, and definitely won't just result in cementing the very systems you criticize. /s