Gifts don’t require repayment. Releasing free software is a gift to the world. Corporations don’t owe free software maintainers a cent, because people using your software doesn’t cost you anything.
What really annoys me is when someone decides to build a corporation around an open source project, and then you get the usual blog post around users not paying or OSS not being sustainable. Yes, using OSS as your marketing and adoption strategy is probably not very reliable and can cause users to use your OSS as if it was OSS, that is, without giving anything back. But usually those projects succeed because they are OSS, and would've had basically no users otherwise. Who would've used MongoDB, elastic search, or redis if they were proprietary and required a paid license from the get go?
In a way, that's also true in this case (success came from being OSS) but again, I get why it seems unfair for some when it's a non profit not being able to sustain itself or get contributions for corporate users.
GPL or Affero GPL plus proprietary license. Of course this puts off outside contributors so not if you want a "bazaar" development mode—but people complaining about this are usually not doing so.
It’s like Microsoft’s VS Code nonsense where all the important bits are non free, or any company with “open core”. They don’t care about software freedoms; it’s just open source cosplay.
If both licenses are accepted by essentially everyone as inherently fully free software licenses, and they don't contradict each other, then what's not to like?
Consider the appropriate example here, which isn't anything to do with AGPL (which many people do NOT accept as a free software license), but rather the AL2 / GPL pairing which was the evolution of the original pairing created by the inventor of dual licensing (Larry Wall).
What's your beef with Artistic License 2.0 / GPL dual licensing?
I remember learning about Affero at a Perl Conference in the late 90's or so.
They forgot to read the footnote on how it actually works in capitalist and money driven societies.
But we've regulated the tragedy of the commons in all sorts of other instances. There's no reason, for example, that a small percentage of corporate income tax couldn't be allocated to a grant program for free and open source software projects.
It isn't hard to notice, for example, that in EU where gamedev companies often receive grants for various nebulous reasons tend to be companies that do not need the money in the first place (and yes, of course there are devs who received money that needed them, somehow people have to excuse the existence things they benefit from).
We manage to do this within other fields of endeavor, at least in the United States, by using an intermediary. Examples: National Science Foundation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts.
Ultimately if people value things, they will buy them. Forcing people to pay for things they don’t want to buy simply because you think it would be good for them is a special kind of tyranny.
Wait until you learn where the rest of your tax dollars get spent.
Then all FOSS hackers will be like Khrushchev, wondering why Western industry always outproduced his own, even though the Soviets "where doing everything right".
There definitely is a reason, and it's the same reason this problem exists in the first place: it's hard to measure the value a library or tool generates, whether it's open source or not. How are you going to allocate this tax to projects at scale?
Companies already can barely solve this problem internally, and often fail completely at it. Just imagine how many times you read a comment on HN lamenting the lack of investment in IT infrastructure. The idea that you'll solve it at society scale as a government, for things much more nebulous than even IT infrastructure, is laughable.
They better pay, or some body 15 years from now will have to spend $10,000 just to being learning how to code.
That not only reduces number of programmers that you can hire, that will create a serious general programmer crunch, that will likely increase the cost of making software 1000x.
Tell me you've never been an open source maintainer without telling me you've never been an open source maintainer. :)
My project might be given to you for free but if you want my time you'll have to pay for it - and i get to decide if i'll sell it to you.
Or, as the case may be, claim that I'll look at them soon, and never make it back.
(Or, when at one point I had a job as an open source developer, to the extent that I thought it would improve our software.)
Where do you draw the line between extending your project and providing free labor to a for-profit company?
Fixing bugs is less controversial, while finding solutions to issues arising in bespoke production environments, with short deadlines, is grueling work for which companies are usually gladly purchasing support contract. Where is the line past which you ask for money, and are you really fine helping a company avoid lawsuits and brand damage after they neglect updates for years, with no gratitude from their side? Case in point: log4shell in late 2021
I work on my various projects to the extent that it is fun. If it stops being fun, I don't do it. Making something broadly useful is generally more fun than helping someone with a one-off thing, though that is not my decision criteria.
If someone wants me to do something that isn't fun, they can offer me money, though they will generally need to offer me enough more money than it isn't worth it.
If you want to bountysource a solution do that. If you don’t want to fix an issue don’t.
If that sounds fun to you, I really cannot argue against it. Usually, that is part of a support contract, and therefore hobbyist open source developers basically supply free labor to for-profit companies.
definite maybe, but it is not only that.