>> Gratitude-ware is not constrained by what you are selling.. only by 1) what can pass through corporate accounting 2) how convenient it is.
I've bought support contracts and promptly shredded the support contact information effectively to just make a donation for software we use extensively but is free.
Make it easy for us to pay you. Finance departments will not ask if the license or support contract covers all aspects etc so it's easy to buy those (PO number please!). But the last time I tried to do a straight up donation, I spend months before giving up.
I understand the intention, but you should have "used" support.
You don't need to be picky and call it for every minor thing, but calling attention to the author about a problem or issue that can be improved is valuable
This really isn't an option for a lot of things, and gives you some really perverse incentives to make things complex enough that they need support. Who's going to buy support licenses for /bin/ls, or most of coreutils, or most of libc?
You'll get people buying support licenses for MySQL and other difficult to configure & operate codebases, but not for the vast majority of code they use on their systems.
I work for a big company that runs a shit-ton of open source, we sponsor the two/three biggest projects we use, but by volume it's 0.1% of the total number of open source projects we use, at best.
This is a general problem for open source, everyone's using a huge long tail of infrastructure code that needs to be maintained, but any one company has no strong reason to support it.
There are details, especially with large projects that have many contributors, but it is done.
Gratitude-ware is not constrained by what you are selling.. only by 1) what can pass through corporate accounting 2) how convenient it is.
Though it would be nice if the majority of people who intend to make money from opensource use Apache or MIT, however it is perfectly viable to make money from GPL.
This is the crux of the problem - creators generally think "can I sell X with Y license?" and scared and give up. Just look at Pfsense - it is making money using a single click support license contract.
Hell, people will pay for documentation. Make it corporate friendly and for please please generate invoices.