feross, maintainer of StandardJS, ran an experiment on showing ads in the terminal on install of his package.
Many people on the Internet freaked out. Many others who have been open source maintainers or tried to fund OSS efforts supported the experiment.
A number of important quotes from this article:
Sustainability is another way to say subsistence . This is why the common phrase “open source sustainability” isn’t ideal.
We should set our goals higher than subsistence . Folks who work on open source have a right to thrive and to be fairly compensated for our labor.
Note: this is not about an expectation of pay, but rather thinking about the opportunity cost of not having to take a corporate job, but instead build public goods / common goods AND get compensated. That is: can we make open source a job?