Patches and contributions take a non-negligible amount of time and resources to review, test and integrate, as well as adding to the ongoing maintenance burden. They might be welcome, but they are absolutely not cost-free and I wouldn't consider them a "form of bill paying", the benefit (if any) is far too indirect and it doesn't directly help the bottom-line in any way.
Something should pay for the bills and if the oss project creates lots of real value then I would prefer to live in a world where some of that value goes to pay the bills. The alternative world simply discourages oss since devs would have to work other jobs. There is qualitative difference when you have a dedicated core team vs just everyone contributing patches.
Could it be that OSS is simply not a sustainable business model for the long haul and it was simply successful in a period of history when vast money was made quickly by landgrab expansion of technology to consolidate/provide many basic services and the code itself wasn’t the competitive differentiator? I don’t know but that’s a possibility too. I question why one would be concerned in keeping OSS alive, as a business, assuming it cannot survive on its own feet. There’s no inherent reason OSS should somehow forcefully live. It’s already changing its character via AGPL and Mongo license-style things in the face of AWS cloud simply deploying and milking cash.
(The above is assuming the concern that it is funding that’s a problem today; I don’t quite see it that way [for instance, I strongly suspect Nginx to have made more money than DBX so far, so who are we to say who’s been more successful; market cap ain’t everything], but that’s a hypothetical to think about.)
Moreover, supporting a project does not equate supporting its existing maintainers. It could mean taking some partial ownership including the review side and having some developers on your own payroll. Seems like that’s how the big project are done most of the time. The Open Core model we are focusing on is a niche and arguably more akin to fremium products than free software as a thing with communal ownership.
OSS is not a business model, but more closely matches charity and non-profits, and run on donations and altruism of their users.
i find it annoying that people here keep saying that a company _should_ pay for their open source software usage just because they have money to do so. They don't have an obligation. They could donate - and some do - but it is in no way required of them, regardless of how much value they derive from using said OSS.
Open-core projects, which has a somewhat useless core and a paid for 'enterprise' version is not, under my eyes, a proper OSS project, but instead is a way to market their proprietary product.
The serendipity was GPL getting uptake thanks to Linux and GCC.
Linux via the ongoing lawsuit with BSD back then, and GCC because UNIX vendors started charging for their compilers, with GCC being the only alternative available.
However everyone needs to pay their bills, therefore the push for non-copyleft licenses, thus in a couple of years GPL based software will either be gone, or under dual licenses.
You already see this happening with BSD/MIT based alternatives to Linux on the IoT space, NuttX, RTOS, Azure RTOS, Zephyr, Google's Fuchsia, ARM's mbed, Arduino, ...
>> "There’s no inherent reason OSS should somehow forcefully live"
What on earth does this tirade even mean? Every business lives 'forcefully' and fights for survival. Sometimes it comes with values, i.e. we dont use child labour in DRK to mine thallium, fairtrade, organic, etc. OSS is one of those values.