People actually pay for closed source software, even if piracy might happen.
SaaS is the only way left to force most people to actually pay for the FOSS stuff they leach.
SaaS is the only way left to force most people to actually pay for the FOSS stuff they leach.
Take a look at Ardour for an example. Red Hat too.
I should also note that nowadays Red-Hat belongs to IBM, so there are other forms of funding beyond support contracts for Red-Hat enterprise.
Yeah there is CentOS Stream now, but that isn't what freeloaders want.
Alternatives popped up literally days after the annoumcement of centos stream. We got back to original point. If you know the history of rhel and its clones, you surely know they used to be tenth of projects similar to centos, some much more active/reactive. The redhat funding of centos as a perfect rhel clone is more a parenthesis in history than anything.
So in the end freeloaders still get exactly what they want.
> Yeah there is CentOS Stream now, but that isn't what freeloaders want.
I would say that isn't what some freeloaders think they want. All the feedback I get from people deciding to stick to centos stream and trying it out before a potential switch to something else has bern mostly the same: a lot of fuss for nothing, their life hasn't changed and centos is still meeting their needs.
Recurring income is a stronger business model, nobody's denying that, but that doesn't mean it's an improvement for the user or that those producing software with a goal of financial gain would have just released standalone open source software if only free software licenses had been more sympathetic to their needs. Rather, I think if SaaS did not exist, if their first goal is revenue, many of these groups would have just released straight up proprietary software.
The "free" in "Free and Open Source Software" is free as in speech, not free as in beer. We'd like to think that decision to charge or not charge for the product is orthogonal to the decision to make the source code available. In practice there is some interrelation.
But FOSS was never "you can't charge for it."