Every once in a while there are calls to "pay/charge for your FOSS software because developers" need to eat, and while that's true, it's not really that simple either.

Poverty can be seen from (at least) two perspectives; income and expense. On the one hand poverty can mean having no or insufficient income, or being a victim of eg. labour theft. But it can also mean being unable to afford the things you need, or them being so expensive that you don't have enough money left for other things.

These are really one and the same thing when it comes down to it, but the point I am trying to make here is that there's more to it than just not getting paid. For example, consider people who use FOSS software *because* they cannot afford to pay for software.

None of this changes that developers need to eat, and that people should be paid for their work, but it *does* mean that you should think carefully about *how* to do it - maybe charging a flat purchasing fee is not the right option. Pay what you want? Income-dependent cost? Donations? Regional pricing? Free licenses under certain conditions?

There are lots of possible ways to approach this in a way that the developers are fairly compensated *and* you are not excluding people from your community or software based on their wealth; but the important thing is that you actually think about the right option here, and don't just leave it at "charge for the software and consider the problem solved".

Likewise, how are you dealing with dependencies? It's easy to charge for end-user software, but charging for libraries is much more difficult - even though those often do a lot of the heavy lifting, and a lot of expertise and work has gone into their development. How will you ensure that *their* developers get to eat too?

You don't need to always get everything right the first time, but be cautious of simplistic narratives that only say "pay people for their work" and leave you to draw the rest of the owl. There's a lot more to it than that.