> it's amazing to me as a programmer how commercial minded designers are in tech
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 bit like the memes where designers/photographers/ect are asked to do work for "exposure". The devaluation of creative output is quite sad, people who go out of their way to create something you can use for small fee should be held up as examples of the best of the community.
The vast majority of people who "create" (rather than contribute to) an open source projects are doing so for some sort of "commercial" reason. Wether it's an ambition to built a business around it, promote themselves as an expert, or being done as part of study to further themselves, its all about personal growth which translates to an income.
I fear we are all becoming too used to building upon the "free" foundations of open source and it blinds us to the creativity that goes into these types of projects.
> If a library has a community, it would be forked the 2nd day if it tries to pull something like this
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. With most open source projects the majority of the work is contributed by a very small group of people, true if you frustrate a core contributor they may justifiably fork the project. However we should champion open source projects where the core team find a way to commercialise it in a sustainable way, when done well it only benefits the community.
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. Examples I can think of:
- Ionic Framework and Capacitor from Ionic
- Tailwind (actually a brilliant counter example with Tailwind UI being the commercial upgrade)
- Wagtail from Torchbox
- Wordpress and Automattic
- Docker
- HashiCorp