Comment by echelon

> > Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.

This is interesting. If it had a limitation on reselling or a non-commercial / non-compete clause, it'd be almost perfect.

Today lots of companies come in and take open source software and "steal" the profits. (You could argue that theft is invalid since the license allows for this.) This makes it hard for the authors to build a durable business. Certainly difficult to build into a large-scale company.

Open source needs a better mechanism for authors to make money with what they create while still enabling user freedom to do what they want with the software - modify, reuse, publish changes, etc.

"Open core" is one strategy, but it feels like stepping around limitations in the license. Just spelling out "we want to make money in a defensible way" and giving user freedoms seems like a step in the right direction. More companies would probably opt to share their code if this happened.