hastly

The thing is, free riding isn't necessarily cheaper for anyone.

When you're depending on the software in question, it being underfunded might mean you're not getting the quality and features that would pay off in multiples for you. You could be sitting on a pile of bugs, or your dependency could be abandoned at your expense. These things happen all the time in open source land and it's a tragedy.

I'm not convinced that freeriding is really rational at all. I would however grant that it's both easy and lazy.

Isn't taking money for extra features in desktop software the oldest trick in the book?

Either way I don't think the problem is one of individual users not paying for their apps. I think the major problem is that of huge companies who get business value from the code use it to make money and give back nothing in return.

Maybe we should turn our open source projects into businesses? At least make it clear we're open to taking money for extra features and/or support?

I mean, I have a whole list of projects I would like to support in a meaningful way through a subscription for some service, but it seems finding a way to do this is itself a hoop to jump through. Even if I'm super benevolent maybe I'm not willing to do HR/accounting work in order to exercise my benevolence.

I know about Gittip and the like, but if you're a business (the only kind of entity with meaningful money to throw at this problem), you'd rather have a clearcut way to pay for a service, not a platform for dropping pennies.

Making everything virally GPL doesn't solve the problem of nobody paying for open source development.

I actually think if everything out there was GPL'd, it would make it even more difficult to build businesses and make money from open source software, because you couldn't use open source in a proprietary project if you so chose.

I think instead we need a set of incentives in which it's a terrible idea to use software, open source or not, without sharing a fair slice of the value you're getting with the author(s). How to actually implement this is left as an exercise for the reader.