> 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.

>> 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

You're describing commercial software, not FOSS. and yes if you have 10000 customers paying $200 a year, you have a very successful business.

Of course it may take you a few minutes to convince 10000 businesses to pony up the cash, but that's the easy part right?