Well, generally (not always) monetization revolves around having a non-free product at some stage, I think.
Think about the business model of, say, charging for support for an open source library. Users don't pay that essentially _ever_. A business will pay, and they'll pay because they produce a non-free product (maybe it's SaaS, maybe they license proprietary software to other entities, whatever).
A game is the end of the line. If it's free software, (essentially) no-one pays for it.
There are also various examples of companies like GitLab that have the nonfree SaaS version and the free (MIT!) community version.
I'd be interested in seeing examples of a pure free software business model.
Thanks for mentioning GitLab. We would not have been able to grow as fast as we did without adopting an open core model. In the beginning we sold only support but companies tended to cancel their support contract after not needing it for a year. The margins on out self-hosted product are much better than on our SaaS product because of the hosting fees for free users.
An example is custom software development. I've worked in a couple of companies where all software was Free, and most was published publicly. The difference is that we didn't sell a product, but a service: developing something that didn't exist yet.
I think that we would see much more of this is proprietary software didn't exist. But of course, re-selling the same development over and over and over again is much more profitable, so it's hard to compete with that.
Think about the business model of, say, charging for support for an open source library. Users don't pay that essentially _ever_. A business will pay, and they'll pay because they produce a non-free product (maybe it's SaaS, maybe they license proprietary software to other entities, whatever).
A game is the end of the line. If it's free software, (essentially) no-one pays for it.
There are also various examples of companies like GitLab that have the nonfree SaaS version and the free (MIT!) community version.
I'd be interested in seeing examples of a pure free software business model.