[ris]

> Here is an idea, what about being paid in the exact amount that one is willing to pay for their tooling.

A better idea: what if all companies had to pay for all the software they expect to make money using, right down to the metal? No leeching off linux for you. Also no gcc, llvm, postgresql, mysql, python, ruby...

When people try introducing proprietary software into the FOSS ecosystem, I find it equally "incredible" how little they acknowledge that most of their piddly 10k lines of "magic" depends on the tens of millions of lines of code underneath being written by people who decided to take the other path.

It sounds like you're better off out of FOSS, but I can guarantee your job is propped up by its existence, almost no matter what you do.

[pjmlp]

My dear, that was exactly what used to be when I started programming.

Plenty of successful companies used to live from selling all the stack.

In fact GCC only picked up steam the day Sun decided to start charging for the Solaris C compiler.

Thankfully the GPL hate crowd, by pushing MIT/BSD licenses has just brought us the future that will be the reinvention of the public domain and shareware of the 80's.

[dvdkon]

Computer systems have gotten much more complicated. The closest you can get to the "full stack" ideal is probably Microsoft, and even they've given up on maintaining a web browser. Full-stack worked for a while, but nowadays you'd need to be a goliath. You can't even pay for all the components you use, since many parts of today's critical infrastructure are community projects with no corporate backing.

[pjmlp]

Those of us on Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, IBM, Unisys, SAP, Oracle,... platforms mostly do pay for the whole stack, even if it means paying to various vendors.

[pabs3]

I'd rather they pay with employee time than donating money. Developer time is most of the time the more scarce resource.