> I don't follow. All told, OpenSSH is still going strong, and it owes its existence to the right to fork. Sorry, this was too implicit. What I was alluding to

> I don't follow. All told, OpenSSH is still going strong, and it owes its existence to the right to fork. Sorry, this was too implicit. What I was alluding to was the period of time when openssh had some showstopper security issues, and everyone realized it was being maintained by essentially one person with essentially no funding. I don't want to downplay that the copyright owner of source-available software taking it in a bad direction or stopping maintenance or going out of business altogether is a big risk of that model (and of fully proprietary software as well). It totally is, and it is definitely something that the ability to fork solves. But my point is that it's a trade-off. Both models have failure modes. And they both have (different) imperfect solutions for them. > Agreed. It's frustrating that so few people or organisations think to contribute to FOSS projects, even ones they deeply rely on. This is probably where our fundamental difference in philosophy comes from. I don't think it is at all the case that people don't "think to contribute to FOSS projects", it's that the incentives don't work out in favor of it, for most organizations. And I don't think the answer to that is to wish for altruism from organizations and free labor from individuals. > There are ways to monetise aside from patronage/donation, such as paid support and paid managed services, but unfortunately it seems these are rarely successful in generating appreciable income. Yeah, as I said, I find all of these solutions deeply unsatisfying. Patronage/donation has the "relying on altruism" issue. Paid support misaligns incentives, because if you manage to make perfect software, you've also managed to put yourself out of business, whereas if your software is difficult to use, that makes it lucrative. Paid managed services would be great, if Amazon couldn't just slap your code behind an official AWS service that 99% of people are going to use instead of your also-ran; but keeping them from doing that requires the restraint on commercial re-distribution that everyone seems to hate.