The subject of monetizing opensource software is a tricky one. Some companies pursue the Open-Core principle, others monetize through the consulting services or cloud infrastructures.
As for investing into opensource, Dropbox is trying to do that when possible, for example we (along with Automattic) did sponsor HTTP/2 development in Nginx.
> - Consulting::: Ease of use is ignored, as if it's too easy people won't need consultants.
Some problems can only be made so easy. Some problems require custom work. Sometimes you need paid support not because the product is low-quality but because you need to know that you can call someone at 3am because your service is down. There are lots of reasons to have consulting.
> - Sponsoring Goals::: Software is almost held at ransom, until goals are reached.
You're assuming the work would get done one way or another. Sometimes people have many other things they could be doing, and they need to justify spending more time on a project than they already do. Or sometimes, people have a fixed amount of time but they're happy to prioritize things people want and will pay for.
(No argument about open-core; that definitely has problems.)
Other great approaches include hosting the software as a service. Depending on the nature of a project, many people may want a service whose primary value proposition is "we'll host this for you so you don't have to maintain and administrate it".
From my (admittedly) limited experience, paid support isn't consulting.
Paid support surely is, as you say, about calling someone at 3am and having them look into an incident.
From my experience, that's not about helping you get the most out of the product, and a hand in tailoring it to your needs - that's the consulting part, and is usually paid for separately (and at much higher rates).
You can just charge companies that make over a certain amount of annual revenue. Then OSS and small companies can use your software fine, but when they get big they have to pay you.
Do you have an example of sponsorship goals actively gating software development? I haven’t seen this one. “I’m not patching this zero day until I get to $1,000,000!”
I suppose, but you know you’re what you’re buying when you sign up for RedHat. I was trying to imagine a scenario where free OSS project does that, like Kubernetes or React.
Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but opinions are my own
I totally disagree. Red Hat patches/maintains things regardless of whether people pay for it. Everything is always available open source. There are numerous derivatives of RHEL that get these for example.
The money you pay for Red Hat stuff is for support. There are always free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer alternatives of red hat products.
As for investing into opensource, Dropbox is trying to do that when possible, for example we (along with Automattic) did sponsor HTTP/2 development in Nginx.