It happens all the time, a maintainer quits/abandons some opensource project due to economic realities. There are comics, jokes, threads, and so on about what the realities of maintaining opensource software are and that most people are not willing to donate or contribute in any way besides opening issues.
There is a lot of resistance to stuff like the business source license, but people do have to earn a living somehow. Doing so with opensource would be amazing. In lieu of the contested licence, could a template similar to Reminna’s actually work? Basically “pay to get this fixed/implemented, make a PR, or it’s low priority/ ‘I will get to it when I get to it’”.
Relevant part of template
### Contributions
In return, or to fix this issue, I'd be willing to:
- [ ] Fix this myself.
- [ ] [Donate](https://remmina.org/donations/) ___ and/or have donated ___ towards fixing it.
- [ ] Take a donation of ___ to fix it.
- [ ] Update the [documentation](https://remmina.gitlab.io/remminadoc.gitlab.io/md__c_o_n_t_r_i_b_u_t_i_n_g.html).
- [ ] Update the [wiki](https://gitlab.com/Remmina/Remmina/-/wikis/home).
- [ ] Translate Remmina in my native language(s) (___) on [Hosted Weblate](https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/remmina/remmina/).
It’s sometimes called a feature bounty.
The only issue is it incentivises focusing on new features, leaving old stuff unmaintained. If you’re asking for money to fix bugs, that incentivises writing code with bugs, as if you write perfect code first time nobody will pay you to fix it.
I think “feature bounty” is a misnomer as it’s not limited to features.
Since it’s opensource, I don’t think it incentivises writing bugs as anybody else could theoretically fork the project and fix your bugs to get the people sick of your bugs onto their fork. And if your project is known for having bugs, it would reduce the number of users willing to use it.
Anti Commercial-AI license
There’s certainly potential for that to be a problem. But it’s not necessarily insurmountable. For starters, I think the idea is you’re not paying to have your thing fixed, you’re paying to have your thing prioritised. The same amount of work is getting done either way, but bugs reported by people who paid will be prioritised over bugs reported by people who don’t pay. If there are no bugs reported by paid users, then unpaid bugs will still be worked on.