>> some FOSS ordering system

I don't mean this cynically; but basically what you are suggesting is that some group of volunteers spend their time and effort to build out a substantial part of the business's infrastructure for free.

So basically, as long as they can get the critical business software part for free, the business becomes feasible.

The short answer is "this probably won't happen". FOSS isn't some magic wand that makes software appear.

And if there was someone determined to make this their pet project, they would need to work closely with a kitchen to understand their requirements. It would likely work well for that kitchen (until the free labor went off and got a real job) but would need a lot more work to become "generic" to the point where a second kitchen could use it. And more work for a third.

Building business systems, and keeping them maintained as the world changes, is a huge amount of work. (I've been building them for 35 years.) It's really not feasible to do it in "spare time".

I think you'd be surprised. Especially for restaurants - there are mom-and-pop operations with smart kids who want to put together a project to make their parents' lives easier. Money isn't the only motivator in life and I'm not convinced you couldn't find someone to donate the capex needed to get an MVP off the ground. https://github.com/topics/food-ordering-system has 537 repositories, I don't have the time deep dive into them and whether any of them are any good, but I think it's evidence enough that FOSS can provide an MVP at least.

Yes, that's a different question from whether the opex is sustainable without a business selling support. And I think the question there is how much can be offloaded to utility-style SaaS like Stripe (i.e. handle changes in taxes) and serverless infrastructure to keep the opex of the FOSS solution itself low. I get the impression that it's hypothetically doable, but the proverbial kids of mom-and-pop store parents don't have the experience or guidance to know how to set that up.

You got it backwards. You're assuming that what is needed is the perfect ordering system that needs to accommodate any theoretical restaurant, when in reality a janky email and WhatsApp based ordering system with payment links where the restaurant and customers adapt to the standardized software is more than good enough.

> basically what you are suggesting is that some group of volunteers spend their time and effort to build out a substantial part of the business's infrastructure for free.

I don't buy this. How many businesses are we talking about? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? So each business commits $200 to $400 and you have a multi-million dollar OSS enterprise solution. For a few million, a small team could easily build a much better ordering system than the utter garbage that's out there now, including setting menus and prices, handling payment, route planning, etc. Ordering online is often completely broken. A bit of collective action solves lots of problems. Yes, each business still has to cover some infra costs, unless that's also collectivized.

Or -- and I know this is absolute blasphemy to say -- the government could create this software. We could call it, I don't know, say, the "U.S. Digital Service" and it could use a tiny amount of tax money to make software that benefits entire industries or huge swaths of people and give it out for free. We could be greasing the wheels of commerce across the entire United States with just a little investment in "greater good" software, but the fucking billionaire psychopath asshole caste wouldn't be able to get their rent from it, so we have to burn it to the fucking ground.

This doesn't have to be an actual problem. We could easily solve it, but we have to have the balls to tell billionaires they're no longer allowed to loot the entire country. Everyone -- yes, you too, reader -- everyone vastly under-estimates how good society could be if it weren't for those fucking little parasites that have to loot and extract rent from everything.