Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to

I'm not sure it fits the free and/or libre software philosophy but I'm a big fan of releasing otherwise free and open source software as a paid version and with some exclusive QoL features in proprietary store fronts.

For example Krita. https://krita.org/en/download/ FOSS but you can buy it on Steam, Microsoft Store, Epic Store, and Apple Store. You get one exclusive feature, automatic updates (and more recently Steam Cloud sync support), and you also support the developers (on the other hand Valve, MS, Epic, and Apple also gets a cut too).

If you read for example the Steam reviews everyone points out that it's a free software but buying on Steam is also a good and very importantly straightforward way to support the devs + the platform itself has such a pull ("buying games you never play") that people buy it just for the case of having it in their library

https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita

The reason I dislike this is because of the game it creates. Let's say we have someone who developed a small, well-used dependency (say: xz) but there is now incentive to be "in the dependency chain." xz is open, LLMs are really good at stealing/recreating; what stops someone from publishing rxz (maybe a rust port, maybe a gnu-r port, maybe it's "Really fast" xz, maybe it's just hoping for a typo in a registry.) This new dependency adds very little over the original xz and xz could have just used a simple PR.

On the other side of things, does accepting a PR from someone grant the author the ability to collect royalties for that software project? If so, how would you quantify that? LOC seems like a quick but really bad answer for what it is incentivizing.

For many, the entire point of "F" in "FOSS" is not getting tangled up in this kind of mess. I personally would never want to add "am I opening myself up to a lawsuit if I don't pay someone for their PR" to enter my calculus of accepting a PR. Especially if this is because I reject payment at all on a project.

Finally, if a company/employee submits code to FOSS under this model, do they now expect a return?

> Now, finally, I have an idea. It's gonna take 5000 words to get there, though, so if you don't have that kind of time, skip to the part about registries.

This article is full of LLMisms, which is to be expected but maybe it wouldn't be 5000 words and wouldn't need this disclaimer if they wrote it themselves

If you want people to pay you for your software, stop writing it for free. Conversely, if you write it for free, don't expect people to pay you for it.

I feel like the main issue with projects switching between a permissive and less permissive license and back is that starting out as fully permissive in the first place was the main error.

If everybody would just agree to start their open source code as something like source-available or OpenRAIL -requiring companies with more than $5M in annual revenue to pay for the work - we wouldn't be in this situation.

https://fair.io/

I think I'm starting to forget, but could someone maybe tell me what the F in FOSS stands for?

how about making money from something else like hardware, to fund software (almost like IP is a fiction and people should be making money from tangible things rather than info)

I'm sure AI can also brainstorm more ideas for (F)OSS business models today

You seem to be forgetting the most important word in FOSS..

Isn't this similar to the anaconda model? (Except they keep the money instead of distributing it.)

Depending on how you count, in my research group we are like 10 and in my whoooole university we are like 60.000 employees. When they went from free to restriced for big organizations I just uninstaled it.

after reading Ford Foundation document [0] i'll go beyond and purpose FOSS not only limit commercial use but also forking [1] as it seems we have an endless stream of libraries which do the same thing, scattering even more this "fragile" ecosystem which would benefit so much of big tech's evergreen

[0] https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep... [1] https://happort.org/constraining_freedom

The usual pushback I get from FOSS zealots is that any time I mention things like money, popularity, increasing adoption etc. they just say none of that matters because it's "not a project goal."

In fact, often they don't even want money to be a thing at all, they think capitalism is inherently evil (cough innovation) and would prefer if everyone was just poor and lived in the woods or something.

Sorry... I like the world to be a little more interesting than that.