To be fair, when people worry about "stealing" their FOSS work, they don't mean someone forking their project, they mean someone outcompeting them on offering commercial infrastructure for their own project, typically launching a competing SaaS service.

Of course, this is explicitly permitted and even encouraged by FOSS licenses, so calling it "stealing" is quite absurd. But it is also a real problem for a company trying to make money by selling its FOSS software.

Essentially, it's pretty clear that you can't make a successful company out of selling free software. You either create a consulting company and push yourself as the expert on some free software that people want to use (what RedHat did, and to a much lesser degree of success, MySQL) or the free software has to be some enabler for your real business (like Linux is to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and all of these other cloud companies and most of the internet, or like Java was to Sun).

▲

Imustaskforhelp 18 hours ago | parent [-]

> Essentially, it's pretty clear that you can't make a successful company out of selling free software

If that is so the case, what about source available licenses similar to O'saasy.

Do they work?

Because personally, although I love foss, its a compromise and I am willing to make it for some of my projects if it means that I can get enough funding to work on it full time basically.

	▲	tsimionescu 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think we know yet if these work, at least for more than 5-10 years. Mongo and Elastic are still kicking, so perhaps they do. But it's very unclear if they would have gotten where they are had they started with the current licenses.