I had such high hopes for RethinkDB as a free and open source alternative to Firebase. FB was a great tool, but was never the same after getting purchased by Go

I had such high hopes for RethinkDB as a free and open source alternative to Firebase. FB was a great tool, but was never the same after getting purchased by Google (I quit following its progress shortly thereafter). This article has less to do with databases or open source software than it does with the fundamentally misaligned incentives of egalitarianism and capitalism. I wish there was a social open source license that said "you can use this indefinitely as long as you pay us something". The price would be up to the user but the generally accepted polite minimum would be at least a penny ($0.01). Then businesses could publicly display their level of support (both initially and yearly) for the software they use, to attract customers. They could also be audited by the IRS, so a lack of patronage could correlate to a lack of equality and maybe even reveal corruption and other malfeasance. At the very least it would reveal a lack of internal controls. This could work kind of like UBI for open source. And I'm definitely not the only one who has ever thought about this. But there is just so much free capital floating around right now that it's a great time to be thinking about how to reform the paradigms that we all depend on.