Comment by elric
4 months ago
When I was younger, I would have been annoyed at this remark because it detracts from the ideological purity of FOSS. Now that I'm older, I laugh at its naïveté. $megacorp wouldn't pay you. The junior engineer at $megacorp who pulled in your library wouldn't even have read the license. And you as a small FOSS engineer wouldn't have the legal clout to make them pay. You wouldn't even know they were using your library.
But in principle I agree that it would behoove profitable companies who benefit from FOSS to either pay or contribute.
They would pay, once their product depends on your work.
Would they? Their products depends on the work of thousands of FOSS contributions. And historically, the vast majority of companies haven't contributed or paid. All they've done is take. There have been numerous cases of GPL violations and other misappropriations of licenses. I don't see why a "Pay me $1000"-clause would be any different.
Was at a talk by the curl maintainer a while back, he has a stack of emails from entitled companies that expect him to work for free. It's mind boggling.
There are companies that will pay because not everybody is mental. With that money you can enforce the license for the others. It doesn't have to be perfect.