Funding open source development needs to be across-the-board inclusive, it is the "R" in "R&D". Open source benefits from a massive parallel pipeline of bad projects and inferior efforts and abandoned ideas from which comes great stuff, but even the bad stuff can teach a lot.
I don't know about that. I suspect that a lot of the time, when a company wants to use modified open source software, they pay someone to make the modifications. Usually, they hire their own person, because they can pay them to make the modifications and then they own those modifications and can keep them internally, but that has a lot of costs: they have to pay the person to become familiar with the source code. It's much cheaper to pay the original developer to make the modifications you want, because they are already familiar with the source code. So if companies couldn't keep the results of the developers' work, they might as well pay the original developer to make the modifications, which both pays the developer's rent, and allows them the choice of what parts of the modifications to include in the end product.
> Funding open source development needs to be across-the-board inclusive, it is the "R" in "R&D". Open source benefits from a massive parallel pipeline of bad projects and inferior efforts and abandoned ideas from which comes great stuff, but even the bad stuff can teach a lot.
This is a good point.
Of course this is a problem that developers made for themselves and something that they were warned against but chose to ignore.
Personally, it's not about money when I do it--for me it's about pushing humanity forward with new capabilities. So for me, the problem really is companies not contributing back changes. Even if companies use my software, I don't see it as me working for them for free, I see it as me working for humanity for free.
That said, no free software I've ever written has ever gotten a significant user base, so perhaps my feelings would be different if I were a more successful free software developer.
The idea of the AGPL is that if you expose a service online which uses AGPL licensed software, you're required to publish the source code with any modifications or additions you've made to it. I'm not sure on the enforceability of these provisions (how would we know if i.e. Amazon was using a modified version of AGPL software and not publishing their changes?).
But, if it works as intended, the AGPL would require that these companies publish the improvements they make to open source software. This would prevent situations like Amazon using modified Linux on their servers without contributing the modifications back to the community. This is a more careful closing of the larger loophole in non-copyleft license that allows, for example, Apple to take BSD code for MacOS X, without contributing back to BSD.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License