Open source developers tend to maintain or contribute to multiple projects at the same time, and a small set of them can be monetized with this. This allows mo

Open source developers tend to maintain or contribute to multiple projects at the same time, and a small set of them can be monetized with this. This allows monetizing those, and does it targeted to large companies who can easily afford it and would happily pay a few bucks to use the software (they would likely burn more money in a meeting discussing whether to adopt the said software or to switch to a free alternative) and I think it's a good trade-off if it allows indie open source developers to pay their bills. On the long term those developers will generate much more open source output than when working as employees somewhere and creating only proprietary software all day and struggling to create open source only when they have some spare time a couple of hours a month. In addition, all this licensezero software will be developed in the open, which brings many of the practical benefits of open source to a vast majority of the users, and the open source ecosystem will grow as a side effect that the developers will also create other software distributed under ordinary open source licenses. Even if just a fraction of their time would be spent on those other open source projects, that can make a huge difference to the ecosystem.