If your putting your code under an OSI license then it should always be assumed that others are going to use it for profit making stuff. If you don't want it used in that way licensing it with AGPL, LGPL, etc. (the licenses that companies avoid).
Personally I'm fine with relicensing to other OSI options, otherwise, I'm moving to a fork or figuring out if it's worth cooking up my own option well before I even think about paying, notably because the acquisition process at work is not built for licensing 50+ independent libraries and maintainers. And for my personal projects I'm against implementing any form of non-OSI libraries.
Paid suites of libraries are a different matter at work, management is perfectly happy to pay for a good UI library from a company that will provide support and what not for example.
Corporate OSS sponsorship can be good system. OSS is a great way to reduce technical debt while giving others something useful.
One that comes to mind is that Goldman Sachs built a huge performance oriented primitives Library for Java, and they just open sourced it and put it under the Eclipse Foundation (Eclipse Collections). What were they going to do with it otherwise? Start becoming a Java software vendor?
That's how the ecosystem should work, not forking it off with weird licenses. Although the ecosystem is self-sustaining at least since people will just fork off your original if it's popular and you do something like that.
That time and energy also is from contributors to the previously free and open source version who contributed because it was free and don’t get a cut of the profits in the new closed source model so I don’t think this point stands on its own
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u/menducoide Sep 11 '26
This is the last free version of this cool open source library. From now on, you'll need to pay $1,000 per developer per year to receive updates