Question for the community: How do people feel about open source projects asking for payment for features? It seems to me that is could be a reasonable request. It seems presumptuous to ask a random person on the internet to do work for you and entirely reasonable to request to paid for that work.
Corollary: are open source authors really responsible for anything? It seems you are responsible for your usage.
I've actually had people give me money to implement specific features they wanted. I'm still not really sure how to feel about it, but it most definitely motivated me to de-prioritize everything else open source I was working on and concentrate on that feature, which would otherwise have remained fairly low priority.
One problem with maintaining open source projects is that you often don't know how difficult it will become to maintain. I have one project that's reached a level of maturity where there are very few issues with it and no new features I want to add. Another is still in beta, and needs a lot of work before it's ready for a final release. And then there's the hell project, which breaks with every new release of Xcode and takes weeks or even months to fix.
As an open source developer, I do want people to use my stuff and have it fulfill their needs. However, I am only one man, with all the failings that entails.
Well, RMS has said that its perfectly okay to pay for the creation of software. Generally I think its fine but it gets distasteful if the person paying doesn't want their change/code to be part of the main body of work. That is the whole 'contribute back' issue.
It can be particularly touchy around the whole "person Y pays people X to add features you want, send the features upstream in a pull, maintainer declines, customers of Y's product argue that Y is violating the GPL because their features aren't in the product, Y says 'hey they don't want them', then customers start yelling at maintainer to take them, and then maintainer feels bushwhacked."
A company I contract for develops a commercial software package for an industry. They allow to companies to 'buy' their priority development time for specialized features with the caveat, any feature that is developed is released in their mainline package. There are no forks, which over time would become more and more expensive to maintain. As of this time, I can say the policy has worked well for them.
Y only has to make the patches available to Y's customers, and GPL is satisfied/Y is not violating GPL and Y's customers are simply wrong in their argument. (I suspect that you know that.)
The implied "problem", that Y's customers are now essentially running on a private fork, not on the maintainers mainline, is no cause to force the maintainer to incorporate the changes. Forking is one of the freedoms in free software.
How do people feel about open source projects asking for payment for features?
I agree that it's presumptuous for people to expect features to be implemented for free just because they want it.
It's pretty scary how toxic some open source communities are in that regard, though, with people going as far as flaming because their feature is not implemented yet.
These days I also ask for money to implement specific features in my projects. Of course, the spirit of open source is still to do it yourself and submit a patch/pull request scratch your own itch) but not everyone can do that.
I would much rather encourage a new developer to contribute, than get a few bucks for a feature. The new developer's involvement is usually worth much more than any amount of money.
Corollary: are open source authors really responsible for anything? It seems you are responsible for your usage.