I was going to use stronger language, but let's just say "this is magical thinking". 1. People don't like paying for things, especially when they can get that

I was going to use stronger language, but let's just say "this is magical thinking". 1. People don't like paying for things, especially when they can get that thing for free with some work on their part. 2. Metering by download is obviously problematic (notwithstanding #1) because now every time your CI job runs yarn install, it gets charged. Meanwhile someone packaging a dependency in a binary that they sell to 1000000 people gets charged once. In my experience the only way to get people to pay for software is to arrange that they simply can't run that software without paying you. This is obviously in conflict with the concept of OSS. Perhaps you can do something if you can get governments to make it illegal to use OSS without paying, but good luck with that.