We don't need more laws. There is something called a License Agreement.
However if you publish your stuff on GPL and other permissive licenses you can't really complain about Amazon, Google and Microsoft making millions on your code while you beg for donations on your Github page.
We just need UBI.
OpenSSL has only recently received support despite powering all the Internet infrastructure for decades.
Xorg, xterm etc. have received very little or nothing. Same for most Unix system tools.
Projects that receive the most are "open" source corporate vanity projects that are also used for bait-and-switch hiring.
If every download cost a tiny amount, could it add up to pay some maintainers full time?
Nobody says that one company has to support every project and google supports many open source projects.
If you want to require payment from anyone who uses your software, use a proprietary license and charge money. The "fair share of revenue" in free for free and open source software is correctly "zero."
In the long term, altruism only works if there aren't too many leeches. Up to 2010, OSS authors at least got recognition, could stay aloof and in general weren't little corporate bitches.
Now, this has changed, so there is no longer any point of writing OSS for free. The corporations have won their long term game, using the freedom propaganda until they owned most of it.
in that sense ownership is relative, for better or worse
writing OSS will always make sense, for certain kinds of projects and perhaps without expecting much compensation fo it most of the time
And when they do, they give up many of those rights in the process. At the very least they give up any right to tell anyone else what they can or can't do with "their" code. The entire premise of FOSS is that software belongs to the community, not to authors. It is fundamentally collectivist, anti-ownership and anti-capitalist at its core, and only recognizes concepts like IP and copyright out of legal necessity.
>Now, this has changed, so there is no longer any point of writing OSS for free.
The only thing that's changed is that a new generation of open source developers have lost the plot now that software has become a billion dollar business and suddenly they want to get paid for work they voluntarily gave away for free. The point has never been compensation.
Again, if programmers want to get paid, they can use a proprietary license, or write code for a corporation and get a paycheck. Or get a second job. Otherwise the complaints from people who likely have never contributed so much as a dime or a single PR for any of the FOSS code they use, and who chose the FOSS path out of a belief in its moral superiority to the capitalist incentives of proprietary software, are starting to get tedious.