Except games either (1) are pay-per-purchase, or (2) are free-to-play and subsidized by whales. In both cases, high usage games tend to make enough to justify the economics of continued support and development.

That's almost exactly the opposite of very popular OSS software, which generates an endless wave of free users. And generally no whales. And high demands for bug fixes. And serious temper tantrums (this has happened to me too) when you explain to users of your free software that you owe them exactly fuck. and. all. and won't be hopping-to in order to fix something for them.

> In both cases, high usage games tend to make enough to justify the economics of continued support and development.

Sure there are some runaway indie hits that make money to cover the development. And Linus Torvalds gets paid $10 million per year to work on open source. But nearly all indie game developers never make anything from their games, same as OSS authors. (Indie games are an the appropriate comparison since we are talking about independent OSS authors, not Facebook developers working on React).

In any case, I am not arguing that all of these endeavors are equivalent in all ways. My only point is that all of the fields have an oversupply of creators. The result is that creators don't have leverage over consumers. To really spell it out: if OSS library creators try sticking the commons clause or other "innovations" on their projects, most businesses are just going to go find another library that does the same thing, without the restriction.

Perhaps a good open source analogy might be libcurl. And just take the many ruby bindings. Since about 2007 or so I’ve maintained a libcurl ruby binding. Other than perhaps using it in some of my own commercial works - that project has netted me $0 and yet has plenty of alternative open source libraries that compete with it for the mind share of the ruby community.... I want great open source projects to prosper so that we can use them to build cool things solve real problems and make real money

The big difference is that those Indie games make money for no one. It isn't like there is some giant cloud company hosting your indie game and selling it to consumers and cutting you out of the equation. There is no demand for that game. On the OSS side there is often huge demand with no compensation to the developer. I'm not making a judgement on whether that is good or bad, I assume most OSS developers know that is the way it works, but I am saying that it isn't comparable to a bunch of games that have no demand and people are making them for their own satisfaction.

I have an OSS project used by 1000s of people and many huge companies. I don't get compensated for that directly and I don't expect to. I'm just happy to be able to use it on my own projects no matter what company I am working with.