Open source has become yet another way for big tech companies to exploit laborers. If you are an independent developer working on an open source project without a copy-left license, you are a fool.
That being said, companies should kick down some love to the OSS projects they use. Especially big companies for which it's just a charitable write-off anyway.
However I see two issues with this model: - the community will shit on it like it's not real OSS - big companies will start banning the use of such licenses
The other alternatives many are doing are paid support, priority issues for sponsors, paid for issues, etc.
https://opensource.org/osd - "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" includes "it may not restrict the program from being used in a business".
"paid support" means you have to make sure your software is good enough to use and crappy enough to need support.
If you were a company, and wanted to pay me, it was easy - send me a PO and you would get the source code to the newer, faster, more capable version.
Nothing in that looks like a donation.
I did it this way precisely because giving someone money for being "super nice" and distributing no-cost FOSS software DOES NOT FIT with the accounting mechanisms of most companies.
Even with this, I was at one pro-FOSS workshop. One of the presenters described how they used my no-cost version and how great it was. (Did I know they used the software? Not until that day.) I pointed out that many FOSS projects are underfunded. Their response was that it was so hard to get their company to fund FOSS projects (along lines that cageface observed).
I pointed out that it's really easy to pay for my project.
They still never bought a copy or support contract.
I came out of that workshop convinced that the primary reason companies like FOSS is because it's generally available at no cost. Not because it reduces long-term dependencies on external parties, not because it improves software development methodologies, and not because it's an essential liberty. But simply because of the cost.
I then got paid twice. After 9 months and multiple inquiries I still don't know how to give them their money back!
It’s fair to assume that slightly different purchasing approvals are needed in the buckets above. In all cases, I’m making an RoI calculation and a return-on-effort calculation.
$0 and not AGPL hits a sweet spot on both RoI and RoE.
The non-FOSS pricing is cheaper, but still in the $10K range. My last sale took about 15 months from start to finish.
FWIW, I got strong feedback that people wouldn't buy it with GPL licensing. It's library software designed to be embedded wherever you need it, so I can understand that.
This was, or at least should have been, known from the beginning; I've certainly been saying it since the '90s. When people were proclaiming FOSS to be "free as in beer and free as in speech", it was pretty clear that most people stopped listening after the first four words.
I deliberately did NOT use that model. Rather, you pay $$$ and get commercial software, which happens to be under a FOSS license.
In other words, I wanted to see what happens if it's not "free as in beer". If you are willing to pay for software, will you pay more, or less, for a FOSS license instead of a commercial one?
Turns out, people don't care - they want the cheapest one. At least, my customers' willingness to pay more for a FOSS license doesn't match my economic risk for selling under a FOSS license.
In a "when I'm king" kind of way I thought it would be great if tech leads had a modest budget for open source contributions (with a minimal amount of oversight to assure it wasn't being funneled off to their friends account).
It might also help with legal / finance to have these funds earmarked so that they only had to approve it in the beginning.
It definitely helps keep the lights on--and also helps justify the open source model to investors and the like. (Anyone reading this who has done such a deal, y'all rock.)
It was a reaction against proprietary closed source software that restricted your rights as a user. To avoid this unilateral license control GPL and it's derivatives were created, but so many open source maintainers refused to use it instead using licenses that were essentially unilateral in the other direction.
And so frankly they're the architects of this, not "big evil corp".