[kotxig]

> Providing customer value is a business model, and it's rather independent of the license underneath.

Yes, my argument and tl;dr is that flooding the market with free software has created an environment where superior for-profit alternatives (open or not) have no value to the majority, so software developers have got to go much much further to create a sense of value. There is of course intrinsic value to the software being used and it took skill and expertise to produce, it's just the perception of value is near zero due to the abundance of free alternatives and the culture of expectation that it should be free.

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To support yourself financially when building a new library of some sort, you either require a commercial sponsor (someone who values this as part of a broader intent, thinks they will get kudos, free maintenance and hiring opportunities, but doesn't devalue their own business by open sourcing it), a derivative business from the software (support contracts, saas, book sales, bs enterprise features that should really have been there to begin with), or is run as a charity (donors or you simply just have to make $0 and lap up the praise for doing it out of the kindness of your heart).

The bottom line here is charity. People routinely work on software for no personal gain and people routinely expect all generic software to be free, to the point where a one off $5 per head charge is considered excessive and will never be considered.

If we imagined a world where people did place value on generic software, that is to say people expected to pay $1-$5 for a compiler or a library, that opens a lot of opportunity to individuals to compete and produce higher quality software and would give me the opportunity to work on things that I find interesting and care about.