I don't think they do, I think they are inquiring into how we can get them to support production of these products without emphasizing on their own profits.
In my experience it's because companies desire a year end return greater than the last. To do so means every investment of time to them needs to be of monetary gain, or else they show gains by cutting the employees that would work on that project and the bottom line goes up. Aka more investors and stock increases (overlap occurs there)
Okay, I would love that but let me see if I can play devils advocate and get productive responses that work in the capitalistic world we are stuck in.
Why would a company pay a team millions of dollars annually to give it away for free. That destines their entire company for failure in their mind. They get no kick backs other than a thank you note for doing so... Which means nothing to their bottom line but down.
take a look at libreoffice, proxmox, pfsense, flexiwan, canonical, redhat if you want an example of this business model actually working, at different stages of success.
You're in the wrong place. Like 100% of people whose motivation for a career in comp sci was the money, it's better to quit now before you invest time and your own money for absolutely nothing.
Of those 100%, some of them went onto rewarding careers elsewhere. Some of them went into dreary jobs elsewhere. But they all eventually went elsewhere.
It's the typical basement dwelling no true Scotsman nerd. You're only a real programmer if you spend 18h a day writing code or complaining on IRC why your neovim doesn't work.
This arrogance is BTW exactly the kind of thinking that brought us Musk. Tech is great, tech will save us all, I can tech, I am great, I will save us all.
You can always release your software under the GPL and charge a licensing fee for an alternative proprietary license. Even the FSF and Richard Stallman are okay with that and it can absolutely be a viable and ethical business model.
That's why only gpl like licences is viable for opensource, because look at freebsd, Apple uses it, Sony uses it, and many others, but did they contributed back as much as Google and others did to Linux? Nah
I love that the gpl license is taking over more and more. I have a couple projects and I proudly use the gpl license. You want to use it? As long as you're at least as open as I am go for it! You want to close source your code? You're going to talk to me about licensing my code then.
First of all, pick a lane. If the entire point is to deliver value to others, then you can’t portray open source devs as the victims of others’ derived value.
But zeroth of all, delivering value to others is virtually never the entire point. There’s a gamut of reasons why people produce open source software, and as well as a wide range of financial compensation that developers get for their labor, from bupkis to high six-figures.
Apache wasn’t written simply out of the goodness of people’s hearts. It was written by the first internet companies so they could make insane amounts of money, and some of those developers won the internet lottery from their stock options and are rich as hell now. https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/10/the-webs-first-banner-ads/
There's licenses that restrict monetary use. Not saying that's the best thing to do, but that certainly would mean you only provide it to people who don't make money from it, which might still be a lot of people.
What if i have an idea and part of that idea is that it's easy to implement; once the idea is out in the world, it's easy to build alternate clients for it. How do i keep megacorps from using their ressources to take the whole thing over à la Google Chrome? Should i patent the idea?
❤️ We all know you’re doing it for your love of the product ❤️ our appreciation is payment enough for you to keep going ❤️ and don’t you dare to not implement what I demand or I’ll tell everyone you suck ❤️
From one project I worked on: a fun community, experience with managing a project, a nice item on my resume, and an unexpected distaste of companies pretending to love open source and not giving anything back.
A nice item on my resume presumes a company sees profits which you are assuming a company desiring profits is willing to make 0 profit deals when spending money on assets. It's flawed at its core.
Oftentimes it's someone creating and maintaining a piece of software or tooling for themselves and their own benefit. They just happen to be nice and forward thinking enough to share it.
Is it though? Like who was promised anything for doing open source software development. It's like volunteering at the soup kitchen. Yeah you're not going to get paid and people are going to eat and leave. That's kind of the point.
Personally, I open-source my random crap because it's possible that someone else had a similar problem and would appreciate a pre-made solution. I have been on the receiving end of that many times, and paying it forward is the least I can do.
People are getting harassed a lot for not supporting their software as others think they should. Look at the xz guy, he basically quit because he couldn't take it anymore.