[blooalien]

I was just about to upvote you until I got to the part where you start trashing FOSS users as unwilling to pay for software. This is a long-time lie of the Linux-hating Win-Troll crowd, since at least the Steve Ballmer days of Microsoft, and patently bullshit. I've personally paid for more (FOSS and closed-source) software since switching to using mostly FOSS software than during my many years as a proprietary software and MS Windows user, and I'm not alone in that. Humble Bundle proved (before they removed public bundle purchase statistics from their website) that Linux users are not only willing to pay for software, but are often willing to pay more for decent software than any typical Windows user will (and most Mac users, too). We also tend to understand and respect software licenses more, and are generally unwilling to freely sign away our freedoms as easily. Problem is that most folks outside of the FOSS community too easily confuse free of cost and free as in freedom, and assume that the only reason people would use FOSS is because it's often free to download and use. Freedom is the reason I use it, and the fact that it's often also free of cost (even though I still pay for some of it) is just "icing on the cake" as the old saying goes.

[bachmeier]

Yep. The move to free software was about much more than the price. Pay for MS Office. Use it on the one machine it was authorized. Need to reinstall? Hope you kept the authorization code. Want to access your data outside of MS Office? Sucker. You stuck it all in their (at that time) proprietary formats. You bought a laptop? Great. Now you can buy another copy of MS Office to go with it.

[api]

I've been a FOSS user since 1993 and am totally willing to pay for software.

Here's the problem: any license that attempt to require businesses to pay for software or that restricts for-profit SaaSification tends to be rejected by the FOSS community. The AGPL is the closest we have and it doesn't really do that even it gets a lot of hate in FOSS circles.

Without such concerns being addressed in the license it's impossible to put any kind of direct simple business model behind open source software. This means that almost all businesses opt for a SaaS model where it's easy to charge or find other roundabout ways to "charge" such as harvesting user data.

TL;DR: the software market has structurally organized itself so as to almost rule out business models other than SaaS and surveillance.