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so in theory, someone could download the source, rebuild, and redistribute a release which would then bypass the Open Source Maintenance Fee, wont it?

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Absolutely.

But it can still work. in a company, as an employee, you can say a tool needs to be paid and get your company to pay even if there are binaries available elsewhere.

I work for a company that sells open source extensions. It would be pretty trivial and legal to remove the license checks, but companies just pay.

Engineering time is money and going through internally the process of building, testing and distributing binaries for every release is a lot of engineering time. Paying a sum of money to make the problem go away is a reasonable solution.

Exactly. The cost, for a small company, is about $500 per year. That's way less than the engineering time it would take to set things up to build internally, keep up to date with fixes, put it all in internal repositories, etc.

Right but in supply chain terms I'm way less likely to trust the build from some random person. So if your company cares about it's supply chain it's easy to justify the expense.

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