[smnrchrds]

I am curious how the landscape of software development would change if everyone followed suit. I am not sure the effect would be a net positive. $2000 per year is inconvenient. $2000 per year for each and every one of the 20 open source projects you use will be prohibitively expensive. Companies would start writing more of their codes in house instead of using commercial open source software. There would be way fewer freelancers and small software shops as the upfront cost will be enormous. Imagine if you had to pay $10,000 up front to start developing a small commercial Django project (e.g. Django, DRF, Dramatiq, Postgres, Redis).

It will be OK if the commercial option only applied to large organizations. But with the current setup, it just makes Dramatiq unreachable for the small players.

[staticassertion]

I don't think so. If you were willing to hire a team to implement some solution that existed in OSS form, why wouldn't you just pay for the OSS version, which would likely be cheaper (since you're spreading the price across many different companies). This is already the appeal of OSS - it's cheap, other people build and use it so it's well tested, etc. Those are significant benefits, and worth paying for over an in-house team.

And we already have pricing models for small/medium sized businesses vs large ones. OSS could easily have similar models.

[friendzis]

2k USD is somewhere between a man-week and a man-month. Hiring a developer to just reimplement existing solution is prohibitively expensive.

[smnrchrds]

The idea is not that everyone would implement the entire functionality of every library they would otherwise use. With big libraries, each user may need 5% of the functionality. But not the same 5%. If the options were paying thousands of dollars or implementing your own, in many cases the latter would make sense. Definitely not in all cases, I admit.

The way I think about it is what if the only database solution was Oracle. I'm sure many would have wrote their own limited buggy DBMS or used flat files instead. It will certainly be more expensive to write your own Oracle RDBMS from scratch instead of paying for the licence. But you don't need most of the features and for the ones you need, the price point does not make sense for all projects. For some projects, flat files or JSON files saved somewhere on the disk wouldn't sound so bad.