@arcfide Thanks for raising the topic of Funding. I was going to include that but forgot somehow.

I share your sentiment when it comes to free-riding and open source consumerism. I've also felt this, from maintaining a couple repos with several thousands of GH stars. You mentioned "It amounts to the enforced or expected slave labor of a group of the most talented individuals in order to benefit the least talented or motivated individuals." I fully agree this happens, because I have personally experienced that. That said, I clearly disagree with the proposed solutions you mentioned, but I hope that this disagreement is just "different thinking", not conflict. :)

I was supposed to mention the topic of Funding, and I view the overall open source movement (which includes Free Software movement) as having a culture of gifting and sharing. In the end, it creates an economic model based on voluntary donations, where donations are not just money, but also artifacts, code, community gardening, etc. Another economic model, the one we find in basic capitalism, is based on exchanges. What you described is basically exchange. In your words, "When someone delivers value into the collaborative ecosystem, they ought to receive meaningful compensation in return". The exchange economic model makes the world keep on going. It works. But so does the gifting economic model. Both are successful in their own qualities, to make the world spin.

I contend that the exchange model doesn't make a lot of sense for open source. Or for knowledge sharing, for that matter. E.g. Wikipedia as a knowledge sharing and collaboration model. Let's consider, e.g., active income and passive income, for bug fixes, new features, and new projects. Two dimensions: type of income versus type of work.

If you apply active income (fix this issue and earn this much money) for bug fixing or new features at scale, we begin optimizing for the wrong things, that is monolith projects, because bug fixing and new features at some point should stop if you have a small enough library, but workers have incentive to keep the project monolithic so that they have enough work in the long run. It basically removes incentive for small and modular packages. The other question is who should pay for that active income if many will share the benefits? Let's say Alice and Bob want bug 1850 fixed. Bob stays silent about it as long as possible. Alice loses her patience and ends up paying for it, then Bob reaps the benefits without paying anything.

Then, for other type of work such as new projects, who should pay for those crazy experimentations that end up becoming actually useful projects after 4 years? There are thousands of weird and unknown open source projects that end up nowhere, but some of them survive as really good and useful. No one can predict which one will turn out to be great. It's kind of like startup investment, except in that case there's equity involved, so it becomes a gambling game with expectations of high wins. But the winning dynamics don't quite apply to open source projects.

In the other dimension of passive income, it tends to become like royalties, and mostly applies post-success. A developer works for free many months/years on a particular project. Then stops, but their project is successful and keeps on bringing money through various sorts of fame-driven streams of income.

Apart from a few isolated use cases where trust is high enough between funder and worker and active income is applicable, I think at large scale the exchange-driven economy doesn't fit well with open source. I'm curious about what kind of models people can find for actually-fair exchange-driven open source income, I'm all ears. I'm also curious if https://licensezero.com/ will work out for anyone. But overall I believe it's like trying to screw with a hammer. Exchange-driven economy is not a good fit for open source.

What I've witnessed that works well, fits like a glove, for open source is the donation-driven economic model. I've been receiving donations from http://opencollective.com/cyclejs and it just works. Backers volunteer to give money. Contributors donate their time to fix issues. Others donate their time to write docs. Other donate their time to share knowledge at conferences and meetups. All these things add up, all these things are "work". Motivational psychology also tells that volunteering is a very productive and engaging activity, because it emphasizes autonomy (of task and method), has purpose, and does not reduce human effort into a do-this-earn-that activity (a reminiscent of the Industrial Revolution). This is why there are people who genuinely will work for free doing open source, even if you tell them they are being slaves. Because they feel they have purpose and they have autonomy to pursue it however they wish. There's nothing you can do to prevent people from making themselves "slaves" (unpejoratively). And we tend to apply this to the monolithic "maintainer" role, which I was proposing we split into multiple modular roles. The Converger, the Extender, the Community gardener, the Reported, the Seeder. All these as voluntary "slaves". Seeding torrents (or seeding Dat files) are also donations of bandwidth. Even bug reports are donation of information, when they are properly reported.

I've witnessed a lot of open source consumerism, but I believe its root come from the surrounding capitalistic urban culture (largely in America) that a lot of those entitled people live in, and not a product of the gifting culture in open source communities online.