There is a service called Patreon, where users can pay their favorite content creators directly, such as YouTube accounts, artists, or even freelance news agents. This bypasses the chunk that content providers and potential managers can take from the few cents you make by looking at an advertisement when consuming your favorite creators’ content. I personally support 3 wildly different content creators on the platform, one making analytical video essays, one making philosophy discussion videos, and another making sketch comedy videos. I don’t pay much, at most $5 a month, but I do it because I enjoy the hell out of their content output and I want more of that content in my life.
While Patreon and the open source community are two very different mediums, they have parallels that can be drawn. One can passively participate in the open source community by benefitting from the open source product, much like how one can benefit freely from a content creator on YouTube or elsewhere. However, for the users that really appreciate the community and want to actively support their source of entertainment, users can contribute to the open source medium or directly support their favorite content creators.
In this way, I think I can explain the motivation behind contributing to the open source community, despite the lack of necessity to do so. When one really appreciates the content they consume and want to give back in a meaningful way, they can and will. They will be a part of the “gift culture” as ESR calls it. If they don’t have the coin or the skills, then they don’t need to also. There are plenty that don’t, after all. It isn’t an expectation, but a very welcome gesture to do so.
But what if one has the coin or the skill to contribute but choose not to? Is that a critique on the person? Perhaps a little bit, but contributing is not an expectation, rather a privilege to the creators. As stated before, it’s the gift culture, and gifts are not to be expected, rather appreciated when they come. People are absolutely entitled to keeping their rarities to themselves. If that wasn’t the case, then the patrons aren’t special anymore! If it’s a closed, paid service, then there really isn’t a difference between the appreciators and the payers. When I play Overwatch, can you spot the difference between myself and the whales that spend mounds of cash on loot boxes (ignoring the fact that I have dropped on a guap on lootboxes on ONE occasion when I needed the Witch Mercy skin)? Probably not. At most, you can identify which players have been playing since the beginning by their season sprays/badges, but no one really pays attention to those details. Or what about the people that use the AWS “Free” tier and the upper tiers? Those are usually reserved for enterprises that use the service that much to justify upgrading their tier and nobody really cares about/notices the difference.
Ooh, what a good segue to my next point. Also like Patreon, the open source community has tiers to contribution. With Patreon, a creator can set different tiers depending on how much you pay a month/per creation or what have you. These mean more perks the more you give them. This is mirrored in the open source community with the different “faces” of reputation. The more you put in, the more you receive. While higher paying patrons get more rewards, that’s hardly the sole reason to do it. Usually, the higher rankings mean a higher spot in the credit sequence, or a personalized note from the creators. They want higher prestige from the creator themselves. Like ESR explains, “if one is well known for generosity, intelligence, fair dealing, leadership ability, and other good qualities, it becomes much easier to persuade other people that they will gain by association with you”. One of the creators I support on Patreon has a Discord server where the different tiers of patrons get different color roles. I would genuinely be lying if I said I did not want a higher tier just for that role. And this is after having a horrible, horrible experience with Discord that makes me not want to visit it often anymore. Humans are weird and they want higher status whenever possible. If that means contributing to the open source community in significant ways, so be it. After all, you can talk about Linus Torvalds to almost anyone technically versed and they will know who you are talking about. That’s some fame for free that you can’t replicate.
But humans also want reimbursement for the work they put out. What’s the point otherwise? That’s the whole point of rewards on Patreon. In the open source community, that usually means reputation, but there is more to reputation than just having your name out there. There is respect behind your name when you have the right reputation. Candidly, I don’t have that much first-hand experience with the open source community, but if somebody were to talk about xtraeme, I could would know the relative weight behind that name. Basically what I’m getting at is, to sustain a healthy community, there needs to be a system of rewards to contribution. This does not always mean fame, but there needs to be some return to the contributors. But that does not mean there needs to be money involved, either. Gaining a weight to their name is more than enough in most situations.