You should add the licence on the website. It's a nice concept but I'll start using it as soon as someone creates a FOSS clone.
I like FOSS, and am grateful for the work open source engineers put into software, and I have also contributed, but this attitude right here where you wont even consider something because it's closed source? What's the point of that? Why shouldn't an engineer be paid? It's very difficult to capture value with open source software. Please explain to me how they could monetize this on par with the effort put into developing this and still have it be open source. This isn't a service that runs in a website, this is something you download and run.
And it's really not about money. I'd be happy to pay a developer for some tool I use everyday if asked for. I already pay for music under CC or FAL.
You put binaries up for download, charge $50, and anyone can pay you the $50, take that binary and legally redistribute it for free. Or they could just take the source and build it for nothing and do the same thing. Talk to me about the economics of making that viable. Please, because if you can I would love to do it that way. I would prefer the source code I write to be open source, but I have to eat and my children have to eat and we need to pay rent, and so I have to capture the value too. Software firms with modest sales can't afford to lose a dime they make, so how could they go FOSS?
This attitude seems to think that open source is some magic wand and that it will be around forever just because it is open source. Open sourced code falls by the wayside all of the time, so I don't think this really matters in the scheme of things.
Some did not like Gnome 3, they created MATE. Some found GCC was too conservative, they created EGCS. And MariaDB. And LibreOffice. And ffmpeg… And…
That's how you guarantee software will continue to fit your needs in the future. It's not paying for Microsoft Works that made people able to open *.wks files with Microsoft Office when Microsoft discontinued the former office suite (though they are some converters available). But it's open-source that made people able to open TrueCrypt files with CipherShed when the developers gave up.
Even at my level, I'm able to tweak the tools for my needs. The last version of zsh is not available on AIX? I can build it myself (and send the fixes upstream). Vim doesn't provide the feature I want? I can add it (and who cares if it's not yet merged upstream? it still does what I want it to do, now).
I find your line of thought to hold little weight.
shouldn't he? EDIT: fixed bad wording. sorry, English is not my native.
> Please explain to me how they could monetize this on par with the effort put into developing this and still have it be open source.
paid closed-source plugins supporting enterprisey protocols, paid support, custom functionality. these are from top of my head, so pretty sure wirefloss devs could think of something as well.
Can I add support for stack Y myself?
No but we’d be happy to talk about it.
Q.E.D.