There has been a lot of talk about companies and individuals adopting licenses that aren’t OSI opensource to protect themselves from mega-corp leechers. Developers have also been condemned who put donation notices in the command-line or during package installation. Projects with opensource cores and paid extensions have also been targets of vitriol.
So, let’s say we wanted to make it possible for the majority of developers to work on software that strictly follows the definition of opensource, which models would be acceptable to make enough money to work on those projects full-time?
I mean we build projects that benifit ourselves and don’t do the boring stuff we don’t want to for free. If we are affected by organizations responsible to us (we are paying customers, investors part owners, voters, etc) that didn’t do due dillegece to maintain their IT systems by getting meaningful SLAs or hiring proven capable devs to support upstream, they we sue them, demand refunds, vote out execs, etc, etc.
I don’t think the free loading concept is very helpful way to frame though. If a bunch of people can make things or run services for next to no cost, that’s great too. Not everything is critical, not every public project needs funding, just because we put in work to something does it mean we need to be paid for it. Somethings only became critical because a bunch of people, just for fun, ran stuff on it and choose it just because it was free.