I suggest you do some research. It is perfectly fine to have “mixed” licenses. Redis operates like this and has no problem making money, as do many others.

“adds a lot of difficulty” is a terribly weak argument - you want to make it your job and get paid for it, of course it will take some effort. Nobody owes you anything.

As a developer, I want my job to be about producing software. Handling the nitty gritty of commercial licensing is something I will happily leave to people who studied to do it.

I also reject the notion that everything should be commercialized, OSS is the antithesis of it.

I agree wholeheartedly with that.

I thought you were proposing a form of hybrid paid-OSS as many seem to want now. If you want to make a living, make it a business (yes, someone will have to deal with the business stuff).

And that's true, but then we circle back to the OP (original problem), if you can't make a living out of OSS you're generally very limited in how much you can achieve, which then stiffles innovation in all other sectors that depend on OSS.

So the question stands, how do we allow OSS maintainers to contribute without forcing them to find ways to monetize their project, which would be against the very nature of OSS?

And I'm loving this discussion, because then why can't you apply it to other fields, like arts? In fact similar discussions are already happening in most creative fields. I know where this is going, and it's great.

>how do we allow OSS maintainers to contribute without forcing them to find ways to monetize their project

The most common way--which is pretty widespread--is to work for a company that is monetizing the project or otherwise depends on it as they're often interested in hiring someone with particular familiarity with the code base.

>which would be against the very nature of OSS

The very nature of OSS is not against monetizing.

> Using "commerical licenses" hurts every use cases that is not profit based.

At the end of the day, people still have to eat.

The direct consequence of releasing you work under a copyleft license is that you have to figure out an alternate source of income in order to sustain yourself.

You could do that by providing paid consultancy, or by selling a product. It's perfectly valid to have a full time day job as an employee to sustain yourself, and do related or totally unrelated open source on the side. It's valid to start your own business providing consultancy based on your own open source project. Or maybe own a business on something entirely unrelated. To put it even to the extreme: you could be homesteading in the outback, living on cans of beans and rice while writing open source code on a dingy laptop powered by a generator and a satellite uplink each night.

My point is that covering your primary needs by making an income should come before any considerations to provide free labour.

In fact, this principle extends beyond open source code and to any creative endeavour. For instance, many famous writers didn't write full time. Kurt Vonnegut managed a Saab car dealership and J.D. Salinger was an entertainment director aboard a cruise ship at one point.

Copyleft isn't a business model. And one should interpret "business model" in the broadest sense of the word here: figuring out your personal finances and how you make an income is privy to the notion.

Copyleft protects the creator exactly because it isn't a business model in itself. Copyleft doesn't guarantee any support or continued maintainership towards users. It is not an SLA. There's zero obligation on your part, as a creator, to maintain anything you release on account of what users might want. You're entirely free to walk away.

As far as users are concerned, if they decide to rely on open source, they also accept the risks that comes with using third party code which doesn't get maintained or even gets abandoned. That's not a problem of the creator, that's entirely the problem of those who rely on open source code. Copyleft protects users to the extent that they are entirely free to fork your code and do whatever they want with it as long as they use the same copyleft terms if they decide to publish their modifications.

The perceived robustness of Linux by users actually translates into a due sense of trust in an emerging collective behaviour: that there will always be a wide community of maintainers working on the codebase either being paid or voluntary. But that trust isn't a formal, legal SLA at any given point.

Those are the consequences that come with deciding to maintain or use open source software.

Yes, it's true that there are several companies who have leveraged open source to unrivalled financial and business success. And it's also true that there are plenty of maintainers who barely see a tuppence for their long hours at night herding issue queues and reviewing pull requests.

Pitting them against each other isn't the way forward. If Amazon or Facebook are using open source software in order to sell their services to the tune of billions of dollars, then that's not solely because of Torvalds' decision to put Linux out there under the GPL license. It's equally because they understood and managed other aspects such as legal compliance, financial / asset management, human resources management, sales, marketing, acquiring and mergers,...

The problem there isn't the apparent 'abuse' of copyleft tools in it's own right. It's a far more complex set of economic, political, financial, cultural, ideological,... variables that created a unique context that allowed those companies to emerge.

The biggest fallacy open source maintainers face is that they are somehow obliged to boundlessly cater to the wishes, desires and needs of communities that emerge around their projects for next to nothing. Even when those communities attract developer teams from Fortune 500 companies.

They are not, that's the whole premise of both copyleft AND copyright.

If you want to give your work away unrestricted and free while pouring in endless amounts of hours, days and weeks, that's totally fine. Just don't be surprised that doing that full time without further consideration won't make you rent at the end of the month. At the end of the day, there simply isn't such thing as a free lunch.

After 20 years, I can tell you that neither closed or open source are better in absolute terms. They both have their drawbacks and their advantages. I've ran into specific business cases where closed source solution clearly was the better option; and vice versa as well.