[swartkrans]

How do you charge for something that can be freely redistributed? How can I charge you $50 for software that you can then take and give to everyone for free because of the open source license? Where are people going to get that software from? From me where it costs $50 or from you where they can get it for free? The GNU website says you can charge for distribution, but that was written back when people distributed CDROMS. Now that it's all over the internet, that model doesn't work anymore.

You put binaries up for download, charge $50, and anyone can pay you the $50, take that binary and legally redistribute it for free. Or they could just take the source and build it for nothing and do the same thing. Talk to me about the economics of making that viable. Please, because if you can I would love to do it that way. I would prefer the source code I write to be open source, but I have to eat and my children have to eat and we need to pay rent, and so I have to capture the value too. Software firms with modest sales can't afford to lose a dime they make, so how could they go FOSS?

[csmajorfive]

Thank you for your reasonable perspective. This open source criticism seems particularly endemic for developer tools that aren't backed by a cloud service. There are very, very few companies that have made money with open source tools in this space and they typically require huge VC investments to get to a place where the product is good enough to warrant large enterprise support contracts and professional services.

[SnacksOnAPlane]

Have you considered doing some freemium model? So maybe the base code is open source, but the modules for decoding some protocols cost money?

[tokenizerrr]

Commercial licenses and training. This may not be FOSS, but it can be open source. Or you can have a partially open source product with some closed source extensions, like JetBrains does.