To be clear, I'm not at all against compensating developers for their work. I am not trying to argue that people do not need to be supported financially, or that you shouldn't donate, or that no one should be able to make a living working on free software, and so on.
What I'm saying is that paying people (or having a trusted security team) to work on software necessarily makes it less free. Note that "less free" doesn't mean worthless and absolutely free isn't the ideal.
Sorry, I used "everybody" to mean a subset of everybody -- the "we" that you referred to, or people generally involved in open source software development.
> it's a shame that so many people know, and yet are unwilling to financially support developers to change that.
Regardless of which set of everyone, this is undoubtedly the case. However, I'm not sure that paying (some of) the developers a wage is the best way to improve the software, particularly as free software.
> initiatives like DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest, are designed to do just this.
You've got this backwards.
Hacktoberfest is a scheme to pay (more) people to contribute (more) to open source projects.
This is an example of why paying people to work on open source doesn't necessarily improve the software.
It also doesn't lower any barriers, it just increases the incentive to overcome them.
So while this might increase the number of people contributing[0] to open source projects,
it doesn't directly increase the number of people who understand and care about the specific project they're contributing to, let alone the broader free software movement.
In short, you can't pay people to care.
[0] according to their pretty weak metric for what contributing is
What I'm saying is that paying people (or having a trusted security team) to work on software necessarily makes it less free. Note that "less free" doesn't mean worthless and absolutely free isn't the ideal.
Sorry, I used "everybody" to mean a subset of everybody -- the "we" that you referred to, or people generally involved in open source software development.
> it's a shame that so many people know, and yet are unwilling to financially support developers to change that.
Regardless of which set of everyone, this is undoubtedly the case. However, I'm not sure that paying (some of) the developers a wage is the best way to improve the software, particularly as free software.
> initiatives like DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest, are designed to do just this.
You've got this backwards. Hacktoberfest is a scheme to pay (more) people to contribute (more) to open source projects. This is an example of why paying people to work on open source doesn't necessarily improve the software. It also doesn't lower any barriers, it just increases the incentive to overcome them.
So while this might increase the number of people contributing[0] to open source projects, it doesn't directly increase the number of people who understand and care about the specific project they're contributing to, let alone the broader free software movement.
In short, you can't pay people to care.
[0] according to their pretty weak metric for what contributing is