Playing devil's advocate here (because I have weakly held opinions and no good answers of my own): > There are a lot of projects (sudo being the most recent ex

Playing devil's advocate here (because I have weakly held opinions and no good answers of my own): > There are a lot of projects (sudo being the most recent example) supported by a team of developers in the single digits (or just one) that are relied upon by projects raking in millions if not billions in annual revenue. But they gave it away for free. That would be the same whether there were big, small or zero companies using the software. I think probably the problem is framed wrong: - maybe giving software away free was a bad idea (I don't believe this; just putting it on the table for conversation) - maybe those giving away their software free should make better calls _for themselves_ about how they spend their time - maybe use different licensing - stop calling it free; instead call it "free a the point of consumption" and consciously build a model to support that at the outset (this is my current personal opinion, but I grew up in the Uk when it had a functional NHS so I'm biassed) - dig deep on what both "free as in beer" and "free as in speech" mean to you and how they relate and what you want to do about that Open source came out of a joyous utopianism that hasn't been backed up the wider societal changes needed to sustain it. This is understandable because that work is ridiculously hard (and I'm aware some people _are_ trying to make those changes. I just day-dream about it). Currently, most of the world works on capitalism, for better or worse. I'm not trying to defend or attack capitalism here, but when you work in a capitalist system and _all_ your other interests and life support systems use capitalism, you have to factor that into your thinking. Open source makes more sense in a post-scaricity society and we're not there yet. FOSS might even help us get there, and the problems we're seeing in the past 3-4 years might be the signs of things changing. I know this message sounds like victim blaming, and that's a real problem in some situations, but I don't think this is the situation here. Everyone working in tech is at a higher than average level of privilege than their immediate peers; working in FOSS is a choice you make from that position of privilege.