Only on the FOSS world, because it is the only way to force devs to pay.
There is another alternative universe where commercial software, including libraries, gets sold.
There is another alternative universe where commercial software, including libraries, gets sold.
[1] https://www.jooq.org/ [2] http://hibernate.org/orm/support/
[0]: https://sidekiq.org/
I think we need something like that for the cloud. Pay an interchangeable cloud provider a monthly pittance, and they host your choice of services as turnkey solutions. No more centralization of data, and no more paying $5/mo for a service wrapper around some FOSS CLI tool.
If I want to get money (not donations) I rather target traditional corps.
What about the approach that the Qt library uses, where they have a free GPL version and a paid commercial license? People might pay to avoid GPL obligations while using the library.
The Qt Company recently changed their publishing model and they provide only recent versions as (L)GPL. Thus Open source users have to migrate to Qt 6 or run an outdated version of 5.7, missing bugfix releases. Migrating to Qt 6 however isn't easy as some components aren't available for Qt 6, yet. Thus Open Source users requiring those modules can't go anywhere.
Aside from that the Qt company restricted access to their builds behind a registration wall.
And if you are willing to pay they created a pricing model, which isn't easy to understand and can become quite expensive, (233$/month/developer) and as it's a subscription you can't simply pay a license and go from there, but you have to subscribe and the moment you terminate the agreement you are forbidden from distributing your application any further with Qt.
Thus unhappy open source users and many users who at least claim they would like to buy for sensible cost, but can't afford.
I remember old issues of Doctor Dobb’s Journal with full-page ads for libraries you could buy to add features to your shrink wrap desktop application. It was a viable business model once.