[anyzen]

Wrong answer. Selling support means that the developer is incentivized to make product unnecessarily complex. Also, with recent developments it turns out that other entities might be better at providing support than original developers, taking away the option to monetize OSS. Why bother writing your own software, when you can just sell services and provide support for a different one?

Note that RedHat, often quoted as success story, is really a services company that just happens to write an occasional piece of software, and support them when their customers need it.

[Eldt]

There's a lot more going on than just incentives to make a product "unnecessarily complex". It's certainly a concern but many companies make it work. I judge this an acceptable answer, not a wrong answer.

[anyzen]

> It's certainly a concern but many companies make it work.

They do? Maybe. But they are walking a thin line between their short term (make it complex so we can, you know, sell support) and long term (make it simple enough that people don't jump ship) commercial interests. This is the reason I call it "unnecessarily" complex - it is in the interest of companies who sell support services that the product is not as easy to use as it could be.

Do we really need this? I think not, and I actually prefer what Redis Labs, MariaDB and others have been doing with the licenses for their modules. Sure, Business Source license and similar are not open-source (as in "freedom to take the product you have built and sell services on top of it, driving you out of similar business as collateral damage"), but at least they provide developers with the incentive to produce easy to use software, and not just because they feel like it, but because they can actually earn their living from it.

There might be some exceptions that "make it work", but this is in spite of just selling services on top of their product, not because of it. The cards are stacked against them - it is much easier (and profitable) to take other persons' product and build on it that it is to build your own.

In my experience, selling support is an acceptable answer only in the eyes of would-be competitors. Otherwise it is just plain wrong. </rant>

[meditate]

I don't see this as an incentive specific to FOSS. Most customers of any software tend to demand increasingly complex featuresets as time goes on.

[anyzen]

The complexity is not specific to FOSS. The incentive as described however is.