I would much rather an honest transactional relationship for commercial software. That also includes consumer commercial software, like phone apps and websites. If we had honest expectations about the cost of software we wouldn't see so much aggressive advertising and tracking.
There are fantastic use cases for the generosity of open source. Education software is something I whole heartedly agree should be driven by open source. But I feel open source has been taken advantage of in commercial settings.
That is often true, but i guess i try to be pragmatic. I did not create the corporation or do all of that work to make that happen. Maybe people think this is easy, but it's not. it is a lot of work in most cases.
I also get paid plenty. Why should i care that someone else is getting paid more? None of this was ever about making significant amounts of money, and open source is almost certainly a bad model to achieve that for real. It tends to create lots of value and attempts to distribute that value usually destroy it.
I may be weird about this though. I have plenty of friends who have made hundreds of millions or billions building those corporations. I chose not to do that, and instead be happy with what i've got (and i've got plenty) and value different things.
This is true of everything. This isn't a problem with open source, it is a problem with society generally.
But the value those corporations are creating is embodied in much more than just the software. It's the whole infrastructure they build, which integrates the software into a complete solution that meets users' needs.
> Why would I want to build a tool for corporate infrastructure if they take it and make millions while I run support for free?
If someone is using a corporation's cloud infrastructure that happens to rely on open source tools you made, they're not going to call you for support when something goes wrong; they're going to call the corporation. If the corporation comes asking you about it, you are perfectly free to set the price of your services to them.
Back to the desire to work on OSS. I used to work on an OSS eCommerce platform for a living, and as an agency we would contribute back. The platform gives us work because it exists, we contribute back. But it's still all commercial software made for monetary gain. Its just tiring, and deters me from working on it after hours. I don't want my whole life to be about making other people money.
"
What's changed is that once open source started getting serious VC's, people believe they've created tons of value, and should be able to extract some of it (in reality, the model created most of the value, not them).
In the past, people were just relatively happy to be doing okay for themselves while created cool software.
Once you try to move to "value extraction", things become a lot thornier because you discover you aren't as important as you thought you were - your attempts to extract value fail. Usually, because it was not you who created the value, but the model.