A lot of Open Source software products operate on the opposite notion. They won't take your money, you have to give it to them.
I use almost entirely Open Source tools as a game dev for various reasons (some ideological and some practical). All of them get money from me on a monthly basis. It's a security thing; I give them money because I want them to stick around and because there are features that they're working on that I'll need for future projects. Paying them money is much more cost efficient and much safer than trying to build all of my own tools, and much safer and more future-proof than buying into commercial engines.
What I get out of that arrangement is closer relationships with the developers, slightly more input into how software gets built, but mostly just confidence that the products will get better and an increased likelyhood that devs will fix things that are incredibly annoying to me. And some software products (Blender in particular) have shown that this model can work really well if there's enough buy-in from the community. Blender/Krita will even let you sponsor development on specific features if you're willing to pay enough money.
Unfortunately, like with anything else, products suffer if there's not enough funding, and a lot of Open Source products are underfunded. There's an open question in the OS world about how you get people to donate voluntarily rather than forcing them to give money. People don't have the perspective I describe above, it's not an intuitive way to the think about software.
But if you're not in that boat, if you're actually willing to pay money purely to get better software, that's a solveable problem today. Many Open Source products support donations, and at the scale you're talking about (equivalent to Mac, one or two devs make something really good as their job), getting donations to the point where people can work on a project full time would be enough to get the kind of quality boosts you want. Most Open Source projects accepting donations are not at that level yet, but again, if you genuinely want to pay money to increase software quality, you can do that.
But it does require a shift in thinking, you have to break away from the philosophy that the Mac ecosystem has aggressively drilled into you that says you pay for access to things. In Mac, the way you support developers is you pay for access, and as a side effect they build better apps. In Linux, (most of the time) you pay for development, not access. Everyone understands in theory that we pay for software because we want the software to improve. But theory is different than practice, emotionally we buy software because we have to. In Linux with Open Source, if you want software to get better you are forced to internalize the underlying theory -- you have to get your brain to actually believe that you are paying for continued development instead of access to something that already exists. And then at that point, you realize that kicking someone $5-10 a month so that they'll add new scripting APIs to Tiled is actually a really good deal.
Mac's system has the advantage that it forces everyone to participate, so it's easier for Mac developers to get enough money to focus on building really polished products. Mac doesn't require its users to believe that they're paying for development. The weakness of Linux's system is it doesn't force everyone to participate in supporting the ecosystem, so there's way less funding. But while that's a legitimate criticism of Open Source, it's also a purely social/psychological phenomenon. There's no law of nature that means we couldn't collectively pay developers of Open Source apps enough so that they could devote the same amount of time to development as Mac devs do.
And if we did that, then quality would skyrocket, Mac is proof of that. The Mac app ecosystem proves that you don't need giant companies to have great software, all you need are a few developers per-app that can afford to put all of their attention into their apps instead of just their free time.
That's a really interesting way of thinking about it. I'm so far not willing to switch away from the Mac because of the app ecosystem, and it's largely because of small, Mac-only applications with just one or two developers. (I also really do like the macOS UX, even if Big Sur gives me more nits to pick, but I'm sure I could adjust to something else.)
The big issue, I guess, is that social/psychological phenomenon you're referring to. I've noticed on HN that when discussions come up about how creators -- artists, fiction writers, journalists, filmmakers, etc. -- are or should be compensated for their work, there is a very loud contingent that invariably pops up arguing, in effect, that creators shouldn't expect any compensation at all. "Nobody is owed a living," and "if they really want to create, they'll do it for free." I can't help but suspect that is also a pretty big stumbling block for funding the creation of free software: everyone philosophically appreciates the free as in speech aspect, but an awful lot of free software consumers seem to be pretty in love with the free as in beer aspect, too.
> but an awful lot of free software consumers seem to be pretty in love with the free as in beer aspect, too.
I do think it's legitimately a shift in thinking, I think that people are not accustomed to actually thinking about why they're paying money -- both in Open Source and with proprietary apps.
It's in some ways to Open Source's credit that it rejects the notion that the only way to fund software is through artificial scarcity of the finished product. There is some debate in Open Source communities about whether rejecting that kind of funding is ultimately a sustainable strategy. And I won't weigh in on that other than to really make it clear that what I'm talking about is not embracing that we need more paywalls in Open Source.
I get my Open Source software free as in speech, but I also get it free as in beer. I am not paying for the software, the software is free. I'm at the point with a lot of this stuff where I won't pay the software, it feels weird to do so. What I am paying for is someone to continue developing the software, I'm paying for someone to devote a few extra minutes towards making the things I am heavily reliant on better. And I'm paying that monthly because at the start of each month, I still want however many minutes of development time my money can buy.
I am not paying for Krita, I am paying for a dedicated team of developers who have thought way more than me about the architecture and UX of Krita, to make Krita's animation system support motion tweening.
When you internalize what you're paying for, it becomes a lot less about "paying what you owe" or "not being a leech" (although of course there are also moral/social aspects to donations as well). It's just realizing that it wouldn't take much money to greatly increase the amount of development time these projects get, and for many of these projects, that increased development time could permanently solve some tangible problems in my life, and I want that.
I use Tiled for 100% of my current mapmaking, even for commercial products that I'm developing. Tiled is free (as in speech and beer), I don't pay for it. But... 222 people donating collectively $2,000 a month mean this developer now has an office where he works on Tiled for 2 days a week. And as a result, I'm observing that Tiled is getting more development and releasing new features that I care about.
Tiled already does a lot of stuff that I care about, and I would like it to be what I use for mapmaking indefinitely. Forget morals or responsibility or anything, 222 people donating around $10 a month is enough to ensure that something exists that would never otherwise exist at the same level of quality and with the same software freedoms, and that it's good enough that I can realistically use it on commercial products. That is a bargain, and it didn't take much collective action to make it happen, and it could get even better in the future. There are problems in the Linux ecosystem that we could permanently solve by even just temporarily as a community dumping money onto the developers working on them, and it wouldn't be that expensive to do.
I use almost entirely Open Source tools as a game dev for various reasons (some ideological and some practical). All of them get money from me on a monthly basis. It's a security thing; I give them money because I want them to stick around and because there are features that they're working on that I'll need for future projects. Paying them money is much more cost efficient and much safer than trying to build all of my own tools, and much safer and more future-proof than buying into commercial engines.
What I get out of that arrangement is closer relationships with the developers, slightly more input into how software gets built, but mostly just confidence that the products will get better and an increased likelyhood that devs will fix things that are incredibly annoying to me. And some software products (Blender in particular) have shown that this model can work really well if there's enough buy-in from the community. Blender/Krita will even let you sponsor development on specific features if you're willing to pay enough money.
Unfortunately, like with anything else, products suffer if there's not enough funding, and a lot of Open Source products are underfunded. There's an open question in the OS world about how you get people to donate voluntarily rather than forcing them to give money. People don't have the perspective I describe above, it's not an intuitive way to the think about software.
But if you're not in that boat, if you're actually willing to pay money purely to get better software, that's a solveable problem today. Many Open Source products support donations, and at the scale you're talking about (equivalent to Mac, one or two devs make something really good as their job), getting donations to the point where people can work on a project full time would be enough to get the kind of quality boosts you want. Most Open Source projects accepting donations are not at that level yet, but again, if you genuinely want to pay money to increase software quality, you can do that.
But it does require a shift in thinking, you have to break away from the philosophy that the Mac ecosystem has aggressively drilled into you that says you pay for access to things. In Mac, the way you support developers is you pay for access, and as a side effect they build better apps. In Linux, (most of the time) you pay for development, not access. Everyone understands in theory that we pay for software because we want the software to improve. But theory is different than practice, emotionally we buy software because we have to. In Linux with Open Source, if you want software to get better you are forced to internalize the underlying theory -- you have to get your brain to actually believe that you are paying for continued development instead of access to something that already exists. And then at that point, you realize that kicking someone $5-10 a month so that they'll add new scripting APIs to Tiled is actually a really good deal.
Mac's system has the advantage that it forces everyone to participate, so it's easier for Mac developers to get enough money to focus on building really polished products. Mac doesn't require its users to believe that they're paying for development. The weakness of Linux's system is it doesn't force everyone to participate in supporting the ecosystem, so there's way less funding. But while that's a legitimate criticism of Open Source, it's also a purely social/psychological phenomenon. There's no law of nature that means we couldn't collectively pay developers of Open Source apps enough so that they could devote the same amount of time to development as Mac devs do.
And if we did that, then quality would skyrocket, Mac is proof of that. The Mac app ecosystem proves that you don't need giant companies to have great software, all you need are a few developers per-app that can afford to put all of their attention into their apps instead of just their free time.