| I get where you are coming from, but when I say FOSS i do not necessarily mean a "FOSS project"... I can imagine when it's very niche with a small user base, you probably do need closed source + for profit company developing it with a high per-license fee to produce anything of useful quality. What I am suggesting is _both_. The FOSS part is purely licensing, as an insurance policy for the users, and to make acquisitions repugnant to the likes of Autodesk (since all that would achieve is funding the software that competes with theirs)... I know that is far from easy to achieve and there is no straight forward business model for that - like I said, i'm probably being too idealistic. [edit] I wonder if such a legal mechanism exists which automatically triggers FOSS licensing upon acquisition or bankruptcy (i.e what happened to blender, but as a requirement)... that would prevent takeovers that do not benefit users as a kind of legally binding promise while also sidestepping the issue of being profitable while developing niche FOSS software. If legally feasible this is a nice promise any currently existing software company can add to their products without changing their business model. In fact thinking about this, as someone who pretty much never buys software anymore, not because I am unwilling to spend money, but because the experience of having the rug pulled from under me too many times frankly makes closed source unpalatable to me - this would make buying (currently) non-free closed source software a lot more comfortable again. It also feels like a good strategy to combat anti-competitive monopolies like autodesk from destroying choice in software. |
The KDE-FreeQt foundation is such a mechanism: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php