Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD

Thanks for replying. Yeah that seems like a decent model -- it starts as a passion project, then acquires users, then the dev stops having as much fun and starts feeling a sense of responsibility.

One solution is to announce that you're abandoning the project and suggest that its users make a plan to fork it / take over maintenance. Instead of adding a social norm that open source devs should get paid, we could drop the norm that open source devs should feel obligated to maintain projects for free. Maybe every README could have info about the primary maintainers and how enthusiastic they think they're going to be about the project going forward, so people can make informed technology choices. That way no one complains about a bait and switch.

Another idea is for the dev to respond to issues on Github by saying things like "I can fix this if you pay $X"