Agreed on most of these points. But I've been on both sides of this transaction, on both sides of the proprietary/FOSS fence (to oversimplify and abstract the d

Agreed on most of these points. But I've been on both sides of this transaction, on both sides of the proprietary/FOSS fence (to oversimplify and abstract the difference between Free and Open Source). From experience it is hard to get people to pay for FOSS; my hat is off to those who can manage it. I do think that vendors should have to put things into some form of shared-source or open-source escrow (possibly shared as they might not have IP rights to open source everything they've done) with a kind of 'dead mans switch' arrangement (i.e. you walk away without updating or responding to bug fix requests, you trigger escrow). I'm perennially concerned that the fundamentalist attitude to proprietary software is suppressing innovation in some areas: especially complex desktop software where there is (a) a heavy requirement for the kind of tedious UI work that FOSS projects clearly don't bother to do and (b) where most or all of the product is "right there in the code" (i.e. once you have Photoshop, you can go to town and edit stuff, and you're not really all that dependent on having access to some other product or service which can be monetized). The attitude reaches its most extreme in software tools. Best expressed by Andy Gocke with his great tweet: https://twitter.com/andygocke/status/1017509689695715328 https://twitter.com/andygocke/status/1017509689695715328 'Developer tools seemed like a good industry to be in, "sell shovels in the gold rush" and all, but it turns out developers prefer to dig for gold with their teeth.'