> 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.
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.