If you're trying to get paid for creative work, donations simply don't work as a model.
There's a fundamental problem for both the arts and sciences, which is that in general terms, knowledge and creativity do not have a market value.
You can't place a market value on a Mozart opera or the Theory of Relativity. You can't even place a market value on last week's most downloaded SoundCloud track. Or on the Linux kernel.
Copyright is an attempt to butt-join creativity with a market economy. As such, it almost works, and it's the least bad solution for the context.
But it's still the wrong answer. I'm not sure what a better answer would be, but it could be something like giving a person with unusual verifiable talent extra resources and time to pursue their interests.
Academia used to work like that, but academia is always highly politicised, both internally and externally, which adds friction and error bars.
If there was a way to create a similar system with less politics, that might work better.
Or not. It's a hard problem to solve. But the current marketisation of everything - and FOSS is still marketised in its own way, IMO - is making things worse, not better.
If you're trying to get paid for creative work, donations simply don't work as a model.
There's a fundamental problem for both the arts and sciences, which is that in general terms, knowledge and creativity do not have a market value.
You can't place a market value on a Mozart opera or the Theory of Relativity. You can't even place a market value on last week's most downloaded SoundCloud track. Or on the Linux kernel.
Copyright is an attempt to butt-join creativity with a market economy. As such, it almost works, and it's the least bad solution for the context.
But it's still the wrong answer. I'm not sure what a better answer would be, but it could be something like giving a person with unusual verifiable talent extra resources and time to pursue their interests.
Academia used to work like that, but academia is always highly politicised, both internally and externally, which adds friction and error bars.
If there was a way to create a similar system with less politics, that might work better.
Or not. It's a hard problem to solve. But the current marketisation of everything - and FOSS is still marketised in its own way, IMO - is making things worse, not better.