> Starting around 15 years ago a number of papers discussed the role of free and open source software (“FOSS”) in cheminformatics [49,50,51,52,53]. Most papers argued that FOSS was essential for scientific reproducibility and economically beneficial to organizations, but said little about how FOSS projects could be funded, or the effect of the funding model on the project. ... The rest of this section outlines the issues involved, in hopes of providing insights for future FOSS software projects.
My goal was to separate the "get it for no cost" from "get it as open source" to see how that changes the dynamic, and continue the conversation on open source in my field.
I tried crowdsourcing for a different project. My experience there is that while it made money, the financial risk was higher and profits lower than straight consulting/contract work on in-house software. How much am I willing to give up to do open source? And now that I'm the sole income source for a wife and two kids, that also changes the personal dynamics.
Some projects allow users to crowdsource funding for new features. That seems to work reasonably well because the cost for a feature is split amongst a number of users who need it.
I agree 100% with your point about support contracts creating a perverse incentive against user-friendliness. I've often wondered how much this effect is responsible for the arcane user interfaces on many pieces of 'enterprise' software (OSS and otherwise).