Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is precisely the thing, some things are valuable precisely because they are free and ubiquitous. It's a form of value that can't be measured directly in $. If you can measure it in $ at all, you can only do it indirectly, in the form of charges for services and ancillary products. There are no guarantees that's always feasible though. There's a threshold beyond which the cost of harvesting the value is higher th…
It seems like a tragedy of the commons situation, which we have been able to fix in other instances with organized funding. We've seen some organizations spring up around funding open source projects, but if e.g. the US government authorized federal grant funding for open source projects, I think it would set an example for industry (and other governments) across the world. The challenge is getting historically scarc…
Plenty of big companies absolutely get open source and leverage it to great effect. Not just in an abusive way (although how is simply exercising a right in Libre terms abusive?), but also to mutual advantage. Plenty of big companies contribute significantly to open source, but where it genuinely serves a need.
The fact is sometimes you need to invest more into creating software than you could ever capture via an OS business model, even indirectly. Plenty of software products cost millions of $ to develop, are needed in short time scales, require massive input from highly skilled non-programmers and there are people who will pay well to get it. Open source models are not well adapted to that sort of requirement.