> While the criticism of this being called "open source" is somewhat valid. The suggestion that people creating usable graphics for the community should do so for free is a little frustrating.
It's a weird balancing act. At the end of the day though, everything on the internet is a race to the bottom; nothing beats free. Of course, you don't have to make your work freely available, if you think that your contributions stand on their own merits then you can of course charge a fee. Here's the thing, though: 99% of the time, developers will completely skip over your product even if the free alternative is decidedly worse. For example:
> The vast majority of people who "create" (rather than contribute to) an open source projects are doing so for some sort of "commercial" reason.
Au contraire, just look at Linux, an OS that was designed as a passion project by One Guy and the Internet. It was developed by people who cared, and thought they could create a better system for free. Commercial purposes appropriated it, not the other way around. This is the case for a number of OSS: before people even contribute to an open-source project, it has to be someone's proof-of-concept, someone's toy project. History simply doesn't align with this claim, it takes a lot of Freudian contrivances to make it true.
> I also find this frustrating as an attitude towards open source, the "open core" concept is completely valid and isn't an argument to fork.
Then use your own license. Of course, then it likely wouldn't be considered open-source, but if you're not comfortable letting your community take control of your project then you probably shouldn't use a license that explicitly allows for exactly that. Source-available licenses will assuage your security-minded customers while deterring those pesky contributors and passionate freeloaders from appropriating your hard work.
> When picking a foundation to build a business on, the advantages of picking one where there is a commercial organisation supporting the project as a core of their own business model is well known.
Of course it is. Money follows money. Your priorities as a software salesman are not the same as your priorities as a software user. That disparity is what drives the misery that makes up the modern commercial software landscape. It's the reason why the whole dream of "open source projects where the core team find a way to commercialise it in a sustainable way" doesn't really exist, and certainly isn't championed. Your goal can either be to empower your users at all costs, or to monetize your product. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.
What makes me mad is watching people appropriate the ideals of Free Software for commercial purposes. The only people you're fooling is users, the developers worth their salt won't even give you the time of day if you're peddling some contrived licensed crapware. Every piece of software you listed at the bottom has openly-licensed alternatives, explicitly because there are droves of people who have nothing to gain from paying for the same thing they could get for free.
It's a free world, and ultimately your choice how you choose to license your work. Truly great work transcends these petty concerns with what your users will think and what commercial alternatives exist. Nothing, and I mean *nothing* beats free.