My heart breaks each time I discover a free tool of recognition is developed by some altruistic talent who lives at a near poverty level while their work generates millions in added value.
I suppose the simplest way would be to offer dual licensing. GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. The problem is, if the source code you are working on depends on third party GPL software it's very hard to do that.
I think this is what should be fixed. There should be some way to have a chain of dual licensing, so that if someone uses a dual-licensed library, they can forward revenues simply to the original license owner from their proprietary license sales.
Source remains open, and developers can eat (and pay for other amenities civilization has to offer).
There should be funding bodies for projects like this who can fund projects and also provide a semblance of orchestration. The Linux Foundation (with the Core Infrastructure Initiative) and the Cloud Native Compute Foundation are already working in the right direction, imo.
There are other organizations that work through contracting work to develop free and open source software. Red Hat and Canonical are obvious ones. But there's also smaller outfits like Continuum Analytics, Igalia, The SQlite Consortium.
Further, there are loads of technology incubators and VCs who would do well to fund projects like Octave to make sure their Data Science startups can rely on these tools.
"There should be funding bodies for projects like this who can fund projects and also provide a semblance of orchestration. "
A much better way than 'government funding' would be for users to just pay for it.
It's called 'capitalism' it works very well.
Oftentimes, it's difficult for the government and centralized bodies to know 'what to fund' and what not to - it's a hard thing, it can get political. Money goes entirely to the wrong places, even with good intentions.
It's not always possible to 'sell something' but often that works well because the amount of money allocated to the project is commensurate with it's value. Roughly.
So - 'bad projects' that are either crap, or nobody really wants - don't get funded.
And the ones that are awesome - and everybody wants to use - get support and expand.
Obviously it's not always ideal, but it's rational.
Maybe - instead of someone offering this guy a job, they could teach him how to charge a nominal amount for the software, in a manner that still respects it's 'open sourcedness'. Like a $5/month price for access to a super set of documentation, that everyone using Octave would love and have no problem paying if the used Octave.
Have you been on the internet for a while? You know that anything someone can get without paying for it, most people will go for it. Pirating video games, torrenting movies, music, ad blockers, etc.
And honestly, this idea of perfect meritocracy, the idea that if you don't get funded, then your project was crap, has been disproven a long time ago. There was a kickstarter that raised insane amounts of money for someone to make potato salad. Not as a product, but making a bowl of potato salad for themselves.
I think Netflix and Steam have proven that convenience can be better than free for a lot of people (not everyone, some don't have the disposable income, and some would rather deal with inconveniences in order to get it free).
I pay Netflix a nominal fee each month and whenever I feel like it I can choose to watch between hundreds of shows (currently working through Penny Dreadful), without having to hunt down a torrent for it. Especially a torrent of good enough quality.
Same with Steam. Sure, I could try to find a game to download via torrent, but I know I can find it on Steam, often at a steep discount (or put it on my wishlist and wait until the inevitable one arrives and they notify me of it).
Additionally, I know it won't have any malware or viruses hidden in it, and will be the most up to date version (seriously, try finding torrents that are up to date for most things, it's almost impossible).
He has a valuable, entrenched product that is apparently used by a lot of people and provides value for them.
If those people won't pay a small sum to use this - or can find some easy substitute, then that could be an indication that this open-source project simply isn't that valuable.
If there is no easy substitute, and he is creating consistent value, he should be able to get some kind of revenue for something, possibly enough to pay himself and a few others to make it better.
It's not always easy, but it's not remotely irrational for him to try a few things. There's no reason for him to 'work for free' to help other people in their endeavours. They can pay him, and everyone still ends up a winner. It's called 'comparative value' - it's how most of the economy works. It's good. Apparently, he wants to 'get a job somewhere' writing code. How are his future employers going to pay him? By asking people to pay for the software that he writes. Or something along those lines.
In fact - given that he does have a 'high degree of expertise' in this open-source he made, that apparently people are using - it would make good economic sense overall if he (and possibly some others) were working on that, as opposed to him 'getting a job' elsewhere. It's a matter of plugging into the revenue stream. Again - not trivial, but something that could surely be tried.
Your post once again goes to the extremely flawed and inaccurate "If people aren't going to pay, then your thing is not good" thought, which has been proven false time and time again.
I'm going to assume that you have no background in business or commerce, which is understandable, most people on HN don't.
If people are not willing to pay for something, then it's a very strong indication that it has no economic value.
Almost by definition.
When people pay $4.00 for a Cappuccino, and are not willing to pay $1 for 'an app' - then yes - 'the app' is worth less (to them) than a cup of coffee.
Sometimes there can transactional friction, IP issues, regulatory issues which distort the market etc., but generally speaking 'price' is a very good proxy for value.
If nobody is willing to pay money for this guys product, then it is worthless, and he should probably stop wasting his time by volunteering his time to make something that nobody derives any value out of.
Those people using it would in that case obviously have something else they can use that is 'just as good', or, they just don't need it at all.
After all - if they will pay $1 for a Bic pen, and not this software, well, that doesn't bode well for how useful this software is for them.
But mostly likely, would rather seem that this software is quite valuable to many researchers. Which is good, because they would likely indeed pay for it, just as they would a pen, a book, their computer, their lab-coat, their eyeglasses, their calculator or their lunch.
It doesn't have to be "government" funding. Sometimes funding via traditional capitalistic sources (starting a company) just isn't the right model to fund something worthwhile. Think about low-level libraries... Also, the overhead of starting a company (or project-specific foundation) can be more inefficient than just running as a one-person shop. Maybe the author is really good at software, but bad at marketing.
Governments and other organizations rarely know 'what to fund'. But there is a good model that is already working in other fields - the grant process.
Why couldn't there be an umbrella organization (not gov't) that accepts donations on behalf of the community, and then has funds available to support open-source projects? There could be grants written, peer review, etc...
"Why couldn't there be an umbrella organization (not gov't) that accepts donations on behalf of the community"
Why would you do that?
Why not just have people pay for it?
No overhead needed.
"But there is a good model that is already working in other fields - the grant process"
'Grants' are speculative redistributions of capital into areas that some decision making body deems worthy - but which may have no bearing at all on what companies and people actually want to use - ergo - not usually very efficient.
We have no choice in some cases (i.e. pure research) but for this stuff we do.
This is just software, it's not rocket science, there's likely a way to just have people pay for it without too much overhead.
A researcher can buy his breakfast, his home, his equipment, his computer, he can buy software as well.
Sales, marketing, payment systems, and invoicing are plenty of overhead.
>This is just software, it's not rocket science, there's likely a way to just have people pay for it without too much overhead.
Sure. People are doing it. Red Hat, Canonical, Continuum, Igalia, and Mozilla are all organizations that pay for developers to work on open source. I would guess OP could look at NumFOCUS or get a job at Continuum Analytics if they want to help move Matlab developers into the open source world.
There's no need for a sales and marketing team for a very well established and entrenched product.
He could make something very easily himself, 1-click to $X a month for some bit of software or service.
In fact, if he did it properly, he could be wealthy, or chose to hire a bunch of people to make his software even better.
Mozilla is a great org, but I'm not sure if they are the best example as I believe they depend on the benevolence (or strategic foresight) of entities like Google etc.
"Pepsi and Coke" are multibillion dollar commodity consumer brands - and have absolutely nothing to do with this.
"No project comes into being fully established"
Octave is well established, so he doesn't have that problem.
For those that are 'new' - it's extremely difficult for governments to decide how to allocate funding. There are 1000's of 'open source' ideas. It's very hard to tell which one's would work, and have merit. It seems this guy was able to make something on his own. Great.
Now he can generate some revenue and expand the project - OR - work full time somewhere else, and plug away at this in his spare time.
"Do that, instead of working on his project."
He's not going to be 'working on his project'. He's going to be 'working full time somewhere else' because his project has no income.
The time and energy he spends on some kind of 'revenue' is an 'investment' not a cost. Once it's up and running, there should hopefully be net surpluses. If it goes well, he can even hire a small team to do 'sales and marketing', and possibly hire some developers to make his project considerably better, so that it's even more useful to others, and possibly even more people want to use it.
There's no reason that he couldn't try to find a way to generate income from his project, it's creating a lot of value for others.
Paying money to each other as a fair exchange of value is how most of the world works, and it works well.
""Pepsi and Coke" are multibillion dollar commodity consumer brands - and have absolutely nothing to do with this."
Really? They're "established and entrenched products." I think they're a pretty good analogy here. Even if you are established and entrenched, you still have to advertise.
"Paying money to each other as a fair exchange of value is how most of the world works, and it works well."
Billions of people in poverty, and rising income inequality would say otherwise.
"Really? They're "established and entrenched products." I think they're a pretty good analogy here.
They are completely irrelevant to this discussion.
"Even if you are established and entrenched, you still have to advertise."
He has a widely adopted product without having advertised before. If he didn't advertise before, why would he have to now?
"Paying money to each other as a fair exchange of value is how most of the world works, and it works well."
Billions of people in poverty, and rising income inequality would say otherwise."
Total rubbish. In the last 40 years, the number of people in the world living in abject poverty has been more than cut in half.
Once China ended their Communist insanity, and embraced free markets in the 1980's, they've lifted 100's of millions out of poverty and they are flourishing.
I'll gather you've never worked in a business role?
i feel that adding middleman organizations sap the margins, and also gives those middleman organizations that do the funding some measure of power that i feel is also undeserved.
I think the dual licensing method would extract the most value and give the most of said value back to the developers.
> i feel that adding middleman organizations sap the margins
That may be, but the point is to keep coders coding. The overhead cost of delegating fund raising to another person who isn't committing code is worth it.
>, and also gives those middleman organizations that do the funding some measure of power that i feel is also undeserved.
I think that it's often very deserved if the organization is well managed. If programmers can keep their hands on keyboards instead of rattling a tin cup then I think it's a better solution than the dual license.
The main fault I've heard with the PyQT licence is that the project has to pay a for a commercial licence from day 0 - companies would like to be able to prototype with the gpl version and start paying when they are close to release.
Can I develop my proprietary application using the GPL version of PyQt?
Yes, so long as you have purchased the commercial version of PyQt before you distribute your proprietary application for the first time. (Note that this is different to the terms of the Qt commercial license.)
>> Blockchains?
>I'm scared to ask what you mean by this.
To copy from another reply:
"I meant it would be convenient if there was some platform to maintain the licence contract chain so that a dual licenced project could use a third party dual licensed library, and the license fees would be forwarded to all license owning parties in a transparent manner."
I'm not claiming it would be a good idea. Just a thought.
I apologize if I'm missing something here, but I don't see how this comment relates to the discussion. This account has also posted other unsubstantive comments, which is against the guidelines. We ban accounts that continue like this, so please comment civilly and substantively or not at all.
> My heart breaks each time I discover a free tool of recognition is developed by some altruistic talent who lives at a near poverty level while their work generates millions in added value.
Maybe there could be a startup that helps people monetise their free software output?
Here's how to do it: combine dev-bootcamps with FSF.
People already pay big bucks to learn how to code, use that to fund the senior devs, the junior devs gain the experience they need to change their career trajectory.
This guy should not have been the director and doing the majority of the legwork for 25 years! He needs to be put in a position to get an awesome job at either classic big tech corporate, then some high prestige research unit. And there should be an understudy in the queue set to take over the work, and eventually earn his reward in the afterlife.
>The OpenSSL project management team consists of four people, and the entire development group consists of 11 members, out of which 10 are volunteers; there is only one full-time employee, Stephen Henson, the lead developer
I mean, it's only OpenSSL which was for a long time the foundation of much of the online economy.
Humble Bundle does this for indie games and other digital goods. I'm guessing they've thought about doing something similar for software like you mention but decided not to for some reason. It would be interesting to know why.
Perhaps the model needs support / services included.
Edit: or perhaps humble bundle is just more oriented to consumer goods.
In open-source there is a huge difference between value generated and value collected. The people behind open-source projects are often clueless (sorry, but it's true) how to extract value from their work while keeping community happy. How about a service which helps authors monetize open-source software for some percentage?
I honestly don't think this will be very easy to achieve on a human level. There are plenty of platforms that allow devs to meet sales partners but most people would rather just go at it alone or don't trust others or don't play well with others etc etc.
Even the author of this piece, who testifies to poverty, chooses to ask for global donations rather than seek out a business partner
I think it would be something like "sign up with us and we handle the sales, support, billing, and invoicing".
Lots of open source projects don't need to bring on a business partner, but they might benefit from something like this. Just like not everyone on Kickstarter would go out and raise money by themselves.
The dev would presumably pay through revenue share, because we already established s/he is poor, making a jv where the marketing provider will ask for many adjustments from the dev because they need results fast. It's not a clear cut provider/client relationship and I'm not sure how many devs would choose to pursue this
Most people (think: GNU wizards) who do projects like this don't want to monetize; not for capability reasons, but for philosophical and social reasons. They think monetization is against some principal of free software, or their morals, or that people will stop using their software if they do, or, simply: they're lazy and just want to code, without worrying about menial things like income.
And then, when they can't afford to work on their project anymore, they want our pity. They don't have mine.
Ok, I am calling for a ban on the "maybe there could be a startup that solves the problem?" style comments without at least trying to flesh out how they would actually do that.
This shouldn't be for-profit. It should be a non-profit granting foundation where projects could apply for grants based on merit and need. Let the foundation handle the paperwork and accept donations on behalf of everyone. Have a board of directors made up of well respected open-source names, and you'd be well on your way.
Grant applications, at least in academia, I've heard take lots of time / etc away from actual work - Although if this became the norm maybe it would lower the hurdle -
Alternatively, an nomination system could be used, or something based on stars / forks / etc of a repository?
They do take time, but they are also helpful for planning purposes (I will do X and Y if given Z amount of money). There would need to be some sort of application, but it doesn't need to be as elaborate as (say) an NSF proposal. I would imagine community engagement or recommendations would also be a valid criterion to elevate a proposal's score.
Gratitude-ware is not constrained by what you are selling.. only by 1) what can pass through corporate accounting 2) how convenient it is.
Though it would be nice if the majority of people who intend to make money from opensource use Apache or MIT, however it is perfectly viable to make money from GPL.
This is the crux of the problem - creators generally think "can I sell X with Y license?" and scared and give up. Just look at Pfsense - it is making money using a single click support license contract.
Hell, people will pay for documentation. Make it corporate friendly and for please please generate invoices.
For me (working at a large(r) corporation) this hits then nail on the head!
>> Gratitude-ware is not constrained by what you are selling.. only by 1) what can pass through corporate accounting 2) how convenient it is.
I've bought support contracts and promptly shredded the support contact information effectively to just make a donation for software we use extensively but is free.
Make it easy for us to pay you. Finance departments will not ask if the license or support contract covers all aspects etc so it's easy to buy those (PO number please!). But the last time I tried to do a straight up donation, I spend months before giving up.
> I've bought support contracts and promptly shredded the support contact information effectively to just make a donation for software we use extensively but is free.
I understand the intention, but you should have "used" support.
You don't need to be picky and call it for every minor thing, but calling attention to the author about a problem or issue that can be improved is valuable
> In case of GPL, you merely sell support licenses.
This really isn't an option for a lot of things, and gives you some really perverse incentives to make things complex enough that they need support. Who's going to buy support licenses for /bin/ls, or most of coreutils, or most of libc?
You'll get people buying support licenses for MySQL and other difficult to configure & operate codebases, but not for the vast majority of code they use on their systems.
I work for a big company that runs a shit-ton of open source, we sponsor the two/three biggest projects we use, but by volume it's 0.1% of the total number of open source projects we use, at best.
This is a general problem for open source, everyone's using a huge long tail of infrastructure code that needs to be maintained, but any one company has no strong reason to support it.
Actually there is another avenue for Gpl software, although it's one fsf may not approve of. You sell copyright exceptions and effectively let a company buy a non-gpl cut of your code.
There are details, especially with large projects that have many contributors, but it is done.
I have watched how people use crypto-currencies to donate for a long time. I also tried it for a own privacy-project which has over 10.000 users / day.
Since you can see the donation-amount in the blockchain, I'm free to say that "blockchains" are not the solution to this problem. People do not donate, no matter if via paypal or bitcoin.
There's so much magical tech bullshit thinking embedded in "if people aren't donating via PayPal, switching to Bitcoin is going to make them donate even though Bitcoin is a lot fucking harder to use than PayPal".
It's not a donation but a licence fee. For enterprises this is effectively compulsory, not opt in. I meant it would be convenient if there was some platform to maintain the licence contract chain so that a dual licenced project could use a third party dual licensed library, and the license fees would be forwarded to all license owning parties in a transparent manner.
Just an idea, not sure if it would work non-parhologically in the end (i.e. some mega troll buying the licensing rights for a set of critical open source libraries, for example ).
What number is this? Is it ten? Ten thousand? I don't think decimal (thousand) separators are necessary when you can write the number without, use scientific notation or the number in words. But there is an English-speaking standard (comma) and an international standard (thin space). Considering that there are at least five better options I think this usage is perverse.
Actually, I agree with him/her. Using decimal points where commas belong, and vice versa, is an insanely stupid idea. People (and countries) who promulgate such ideas should not be encouraged. It's just begging for a Mars Climate Orbiter-type disaster.
I reeeeallly don't like it when I have to think about whether my bench multimeter is reading 115 volts or 115 millivolts.
This is a localization (localisation?) issue: different locales have different conventions. It is important to decide on a standard on, say, a project. In the case of an international forum like HN, it makes sense to ask for clarification when necessary. Even if a convention were added to the FAQ, there will always be those who aren't aware of the convention. Cut each other some slack, at least until the HN community decides to launch a satellite.
The thing is, though, the period was in use as a decimal point for hundreds of years, since the time of Napier and Kepler. And then someone in Europe decided to start using commas because, hey, why not, it's cool and fun to be different for no reason.
You kind of have this with the other licenses, like the MIT one.
However the sad reality is that outside a few unicorns, working in open source means being sponsored by a large corporation or via support contracts, otherwise better give up.
Both don't suit that well to desktop software for example.
> GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises.
This is against the GNU GPL license terms. One can't conditionally license some code under GPL. Ie, a software released under GPL can't be restricted for some purpose (here, 'for non-profit').
The "no string should be attached" is for good. Say for example, a project says "For people to help learn writing code, I'm licensing my project under MIT License," it would be wrong to not release the source code (and only the binary) even if the code is in MIT license. Because that is the purpose why the developer choose MIT for his/her project.
IANAL, but some corporate may be able to turn such carefully crafted words into money with their pricy lawyers. Most of the people are unaware of this. And for this reason, GPL can't be done the same way.
I think they were referring to the "GPL for non-profit" part of the comment. You either don' release it as GPL at all or you release it as GPL for everyone, which means that for-profit companies can use the software free of charge (as long as they obey the terms of the license).
Yeah, you are correct that you can't add a non-commercial clause to the GPL and have it remain the GPL (or compatible with the GPL in either direction).
You could choose to only grant GPL licenses directly to non-profits. They would be free to pass along the same rights to commercial entities, if they chose. It's possible that in a practical sense this would present enough of a hurdle for larger companies to prefer to pay (but plenty possible that it would not).
It is also possible to grant other licenses for situations where the GPL prevents some particular for-profit activity - that kind of approach is presently making some people some money, although the incentives can be weird.
If you own the software, you can grant specific people and institutions a GPL license for your software, and grant other people and institutions a commercial license (and refuse to grant them a GPL license for your software).
However, everyone who has received your software under the GPL can sublicense it to the people who you denied the GPL to. You can't forbid it, but they don't have to, and you can nicely ask them to never sublicense it.
You're kind of correct in a pedantic nitpicky way. If you release code under the GPL you can't prevent anyone, such as an Enterprise, from using it under that license. But what you can do is also offer it under a commercial license, that commercial customers might be more comfortable with, and let the user choose which license they want to use it under. This is very common and it certainly seemed clear to me that this is what the poster meant.
Well, that enterprise has to receive the software under the GPL license first, and you can absolutely refuse to grant them that, in which case they have to find someone else who has received it under the GPL, and ask that party to sublicense it to the enterprise under the GPL.
Two libraries used by Octave, FFTW and SuiteSparse, both do exactly this - GPL for open source usage, or commercial paid licenses for inclusion in proprietary software (like Matlab).
Selling software via a proprietary license to an enterprise can be bad for open source because it means that the enterprise doesn't need to obey the terms of the GPL. They are free to modify and adapt the code without contributing the changes back to the community, which kind of ruuing the point of the GPL in the first place.
This method also only works if the copyright if fully owned by a single person or entity, with all code contributors signing a contributor licensing agreement to give away their copyrights to a single entity. This is problematic because now there is the possibility that this single entity gets bought out by an evil corporation (say, Oracle), which can choose to continue developing the project without releasing the modifications under an open source license.
>They are free to modify and adapt the code without contributing the changes back to the community, which kind of ruuing the point of the GPL in the first place.
As they are with the GPL so long as they don't distribute the modified code outside of the organization.
If they receive a copy of the software under a non-GPL license they might also be allowed to redistribute modified versions without releasing the source code. (This is usually the whole point of having the proprietary dual-licensing scheme).
You're throwing out technical solutions – one law-technical, one crypto-technical – for what's essentially a social problem.
You don't need the draconian measure of dividing the OSS community, turning the idea of Free-as-Speech software into what's essentially shareware with source code access.
Large corporations have (obviously) vast financial resources. And – more importantly – they are (usually) staffed by humans. Have you ever felt the wish to be generous to someone whose software you used extensively? That feeling doesn't go away when you step into an office that requires a name tag to pass security.
Even mid-level managers or programmers usually can spend 4-figures easily without much oversight. And even if: I have witnessed a few cases where such requests went up the chain and came back with an added zero, despite HN third-favourite cliché being "companies have a duty only to shareholders and anything that deviates from 'greed is good' is a criminal offence'".
Sometimes it helps to offer a some sort of service contract, sponsoring or a workshop. They're bought as tokens to cover all eventualities.
So what's missing? Probably something like the FSF is doing here, handling paperwork and making it tax-deductible. I think it should be tied into some sort of coherent marketing strategy, kinda like the Apache foundation but more accessible to smaller projects, and possibly even a brand identity (/website) that doesn't trigger nostalgia for teletext. Mozilla is doing the best job in OSS marketing I can think of, but doesn't have a model for such projects. Maybe a Github foundation could also find success with a Wikimedia-style campaign. Although I'll hate myself for suggesting it if it ever happens.
Plus, unfortunately, a tiny bit of effort by developers. If you're just coding away at home and loving it, I can understand that it seems unfair, useless, out-of-personal-scope etc. that you should be doing fundraising. But it's also a bit too easy to expect good things to happen just because there's good code. (I have no knowledge of the octave situation specifically, and they may have done an excellent job and I'm wrong – this is just my general impression of some of these lone-coder projects).
Let's also not forget that OSS as a whole is probably doing better today than ever before. For every case such as this, there are dozens of cases where people are hired by large companies and largely left to work on their projects, or OSS created and released from within corporations, or successful startups with an OSS strategy etc.
Yeah, and "blockchain" isn't actually a magic spell that solves random problems...
It is his responsibility to capture the value of his work. The world does not owe him this. The world doesn't owe him anything unless he demands it.
You're asking to have your cake and eat it to: Give software away (altruism) but also feel guilty when he complains that he doesn't have any money. You can't have both.
are there really that many external contributions for most projects? and if there are, i would imagine that it's a "simple matter of accounting" to distribute the wealth received accordingly.
This isn't about the technical problems of assigning and distributing payouts. It's how it turns one of the most successful altruistic communities into just another domain of capitalism.
There's this story from Freakonomics: A Kindergarten in Israel started to charge a fee for parents arriving late to pick up their children. Result: More parents would arrive late, because paying a fee was less of a burden than the bad conscience they had previous;y had when they made the employees stay late.
This would work in reverse. That good feeling I get when I contribute a patch for some random project I improved at the margins would be devalued by whatever $0.29 I'd get wired at the end of the quarter.
" It's how it turns one of the most successful altruistic communities into just another domain of capitalism."
You hit the nail on the head what troubled me about my own suggestion of easy monetization but could not quite put into words.
Perhaps the few poverty striken maintainers are necessary outliers in this equation. I still feel irritated there can't be some simple opt-in value capture program for recognized bdfl's.
I'm no accountant or lawyer but I would not attempt to distribute money like you are suggesting internationally. Just thinking about the employee/consultant/fee based nature of potential contributors and the tax statuses of every jurisdiction in the world makes me shudder. And money laundering regulations... And funding terror regulations...
I don't think external contributors are interested by a redistribution. If you make a proprietary license for work, people won't use it at work. If they won't use it at work, they won't contribute. I contribute to many open source projects because I use them at work.
This developer has been able to work at their hobby project for a quarter century, and finally has to contemplate the brutal reality of finding a job not related to it.
I suppose the simplest way would be to offer dual licensing. GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. The problem is, if the source code you are working on depends on third party GPL software it's very hard to do that.
I think this is what should be fixed. There should be some way to have a chain of dual licensing, so that if someone uses a dual-licensed library, they can forward revenues simply to the original license owner from their proprietary license sales.
Source remains open, and developers can eat (and pay for other amenities civilization has to offer).
Blockchains?