Its not a crazy concept , the real world non-idealized version of your statement is called tax. We pay taxes for access to free public services.

It is a crazy concept, because taxes are coerced by governments under the threat of violence, whereas the freedoms of FOSS software are intended to be entirely non-coercive. To require compensation of any kind for access and the right to use and distribute code is contrary to the spirit of free and open source software.

If people want to do that, then fair enough, just don't call if free or open source. And don't license your code under free or open source licenses if you care about getting credit or compensation or anything but maximizing software freedom.

There is already the shared source model.

What people call things is a marketing phenomenon. You can complain all you want.. and you should.

> It is a crazy concept, because taxes are coerced by governments under the threat of violence, whereas the freedoms of FOSS software are intended to be entirely non-coercive.

In doubt, you will have to enforce the freedoms of FOSS by going to a court (i.e. use the governmental "violence enforcement system"). On the other hand, if you pay your taxes "voluntarily", you won't be coerced by the government.

In other words: in both cases threats of violence are involved.

Ok but taxes that are invented on the spot by an all-powerful ruler, and imposed by surprise, under immediate threat, do not have a great history in modern society.

I have no clue how you extrapolated all that from my claim that free public services aren't free and are, in fact, paid for by taxpayers.

Free public services are a finite resource. Already existing software is not.

Software maintenance is a finite resource too.

Software maintenance is not already existing software though.

I would actually say yes, they should start doing exactly that.

What you describe constitutes an ideal scenario, frankly. Similar to paying taxes for using roads for deliveries.

It’s not incoherent. It’s a rule that could be made and adhered to for a project.

It’s not possible for GPL projects to restrict the code this way, but the peripheral assets like trademarks, servers, conference slots, board seats, core contributor status could be restricted.