And that's the flaw of the open source business model.
You develop something for free, make it available to everyone for free, allow them to modify use and misuse as they wish. Every single step is your conscious decision.
And then, you beg for donations, and complain that people are not donating?
Doesn't make sense. If you don't want to work for free, just charge for it.
If it was a business model then people would charge, but it’s not a business model it’s an ideal that leads to a common good.
There are parallels to funding education and scholarship programs in public universities. Corporations often rely on human resources around office locations and they spend in order to ensure a steady flow of talent development. Funding open source is not that different of an issue. One challenge here is IT/Tech departments are often cost centers that are strictly budget controlled and it’s harder to make a case for non-essential costs like funding open source.
Perl was created by someone in their spare time away from their day job.
When he needed money he just wrote books and charged for those. Ironically the publisher of those books hired him to continue working on the _language_, and of course, write more books.
I meant the company did not participate in it's creation nor did they fund it in any way. If they had they certainly would not have approved of it being released under an open source license. Also Perl 1.0 was released using Larry's NASA email address and not any other corporate one.
I believe it was NSA not NASA - in his hubristic style larry wall described perl as being born from "a secret project in a secret laboratory".
I'd say the biggest influence on my programming work is recognising how to use that style of humour can help deal with situations that can sometimes get to quite high pressure - e.g. "please rescue this failing 9 month long $x^e6 project before it goes live in the next fortnight"
Cygnus, Red Hat, MySQL, JBoss etc. all had successful business models.
Android, React and other projects come from companies with mixed business models, but they have had success as well - there are billions of active Android phones, and many web sites running React.
Some open source companies did not do well, but lots of closed source companies do not do well either.
Also, open source is not just a business model - sometimes people just give software they wrote away.
I think it's fair to point out that there are two distinct open source models in play here;
There's the "old school" open source, which releases product for the common good. Think Linux, Gnu, Emacs etc. This group would object to the term "business model" since they are explicitly not "businesses".
The second group are commercial products, from commercial companies who wish to leverage some aspect of Open Source to further their commercial ambitions. Think (pretty much) any VC funded "Open source" product. I 100% agree with you in this context.
The latter group (sooner or later) discover that cloud providers will happily offer their product as a service, exactly how their OSS license permits. They are well positioned to extract value from the offering, and thus charge for it.
So yeah, you'll see these companies pivot to a proprietary license - but honestly I don't mind when they do - for them, being OSS was transactional in the first place do it was never going to last forever.
Yeah, I've never thought it compulsory to reimburse for any open source software. Some projects are "lucky" enough to have large corporate contributors/stewards, and others are projects of passion.
Maintenance activities (bug reports, feature additions, participation in community discussions, etc.) should be considered a form of "paying" for OSS - you're giving back and improving the ecosystem. I've done plenty of that for various projects; it's something that I enjoy doing.
You develop something for free, make it available to everyone for free, allow them to modify use and misuse as they wish. Every single step is your conscious decision.
And then, you beg for donations, and complain that people are not donating?
Doesn't make sense. If you don't want to work for free, just charge for it.