Donation-based open source programmer Andre Staltz recently collected data from GitHub, Patreon, and OpenCollective to try to calculate how much money is being donated to popular projects.The results? Out of 58 projects checked, "there were two clearly sustainable open source projects, but the majority (more than 80%) of projects that we usually consider sustainable are actually receiving income below industry standards or even below the poverty threshold."The article suggests concrete actions to stop this "exploitation," including donating to open source projects, as well as more scrutiny of how well open source projects are funded, and "pressuring Microsoft to donate millions to open source projects." It also suggests considering alternative licenses for new projects, and unionizing.But Chris Aniszczyk, the CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, responded on Twitter that the donation-based approach is "a path to ruin for sustainability ... you solve this problem by having companies hire folks or help maintainers build businesses around their projects... let's not turn open source into a gig economy and demand more of companies instead."So what do Slashdot's readers think? Are open source developers being underfunded and exploited? And if so -- what's the solution?