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The article is written by the primary contributor to homebrew, which does indeed have both sponsors and donations...
https://github.com/homebrew/brew#donations
And I find it beyond credibility to believe that the primary contributor is not taking any money for his work on homebrew. Because while homebrew undoubtedly costs some money to host, a vast majority of the hosting is done using GitHub's public repositories.
It feels like these blog posts come out at least once a year. To me, the issue comes down to the fact that companies are fundamentally relying on software that comes with no promises of support or a warranty. I honestly can't think of another industry that relies so heavily on things they get for free and come with no warranty.
So many people act like Open Source is great. But often the love for open source often only goes as far as to say thanks when they're creating a bug report or when they're getting the software for free. Every company I've worked at has used open source code. Only one of them open sourced their code. Many non-decision makers wanted to do open source code but it was never given any time so it would always come down to "You can do it in your free time and release it under our name". So again the company wants free things that benefit them.
Personally, I think the way forward is source available. I have a SaaS boilerplate/product framework thing that I'm releasing under the Business Source License where it's free to use for non production and free for folk generating less than $5,000 a month to use in production[1]. To me this provides the best of both worlds, people who aren't making money can use it for free but those who are using it to generate money need to pay to help fund the development. Free users get best efforts in support and paying customers get priority support. I think if it relies on people paying what they can afford it results in many not paying at all even though they can afford it.
[1] https://github.com/getparthenon/parthenon#faq
His fictional story reminds me of the Homebrew 2.7 debacle: https://github.com/Homebrew/discussions/discussions/340
TL;DR: They deprecated "brew cask install" in version 2.6, then removed it in version 2.7. Sounds fine, right? Except version 2.6 was released on December 1st, and 2.7 was released 20 days later on December 21st, breaking everyone's scripts just before the holidays.
I agree with the overall premise, but there's a balance to be had somewhere. When millions of developers use your tools, you do have to be a little more careful when you make breaking changes.
I think Linus has a point here with his "don't break userspace" rule.
Textual¹ is open-source but sells the precompiled app. Keka² has the app available for free on GitHub but charges for it on the Mac App Store, to support development.
¹ IRC client for macOS: https://github.com/Codeux-Software/Textual
² Un/archiver for macOS: https://github.com/aonez/Keka
Textual¹ is open-source but sells the precompiled app. Keka² has the app available for free on GitHub but charges for it on the Mac App Store, to support development.
¹ IRC client for macOS: https://github.com/Codeux-Software/Textual
² Un/archiver for macOS: https://github.com/aonez/Keka
I recently tried my hand in commercializing my open source project, gitleaks (http://gitleaks.io). I'm keeping the core gitleaks project MIT but changed the gitleaks-action on GitHub to a commercial license. Revenue from the commercial license and maintenance agreements has netted me much more than donations I've received over the past couple years. I encourage any open source maintainer to try and find a business model (plugin, dual license, enterprise support, etc) for their project.
FWIW, here is a blog post explaining the rationale behind starting an LLC https://blog.gitleaks.io/gitleaks-llc-announcement-d7d06a52e...