If we're going to ignore the "official" meaning of open source, then let's take a step back to consider why open source is worth supporting in the first place.
Open source guarantees to me, the user, that competition among vendors will be possible and fair in the future. This is exactly the point that many "fake OSS" licenses try to take away. Okay, maybe it's possible to fork for personal on-prem use, but god forbid someone creates a competing hosted solution that gives any customer more choice. Furthermore, these pieces of software are fucked the day that the company folds, or gets acquired by a malevolent buyer.
Open source guarantees a baseline level of respect towards me, the end user. By letting anyone fork a project that's gone too far in the wrong direction, I know that my software will continue working in the short run and of it's important enough, a competing alternative will emerge that continues without one-sided money or data grabs.
There's nothing inherently wrong with having someone from Microsoft or Google work on open source software, or any VC-funded company that will without fail turn against their users sooner or later. However, if a controlling majority of developers is employed this way, it provides an opportunity for what elsewhere is known as regulatory capture. If Microsoft's goal is to make people dependent on proprietary GitLab and VS Code Marketplace offerings, and Google's goal is to provide the greatest possible amount of ads and tracking to the largest possible user base, it does not matter if the software is open source or not. The end result is the same, I'm left without viable alternatives and big business gets to do with us whatever the hell they please.
Especially when this software becomes ubiquitous and entrenched, paying developers to work on company-controlled OSS instead of community-driven, user-respecting OSS is a net negative for everyone in the long run.
I'm only interested in OSS in so far as it protects my interests as an end user, and/or our common interests as a society, now and in the future. The collaborative aspect is nice, but that's not the reason that we should ask for better compensation for maintainers.
The "Open Source" label as such is indeed meaningless per se, and it doesn't always protect me either, as seen with BSD+MIT software allowing cryptographically-enabled control of devices that I nominally own, or GPL being useless when there is no actual distribution of software involved. That said, I have yet to see a case of non-OSI "open source" that doesn't try to tilt the playing field in biased, controlling and long-term unsustainable or user-hostile ways.
If you can't build a business on a level playing field, perhaps it's in everyone's interest that your business and software dies, or retreats into lower-intensity hobbyist maintainership, instead of leading everyone into a hard dependency on your oh so well-intended monetization of originally useful software. Then at least someone else can take a shot at doing it better.
Those are some pretty twisted reasons to support open source. First of all, you are not a "user" if you use open source. You are an owner. Open source gives you the freedom to control the development process of the software. It sounds like what you want is the freedom to have other people serving you. Also, an inventor who chooses to reserve some rights to control their invention is not acting anti-competitively. You're disagreeing with both law and morality by thinking that. You are not entitled to anything. Open source usually happens because the inventor has nothing to gain from exerting personal control through legal means over their invention. So what it in effect does, is it gives you the power to take control and participate in its development, as an equal, rather than a mere consumer. You can't walk into open source with the consumer mindset because that's just not how things work. Companies like Microsoft that retain full control over their software will break their backs to serve you, because they're the only ones who can. But you can't expect that kind of service from people who are simply trying to give you the DIY tools to do it yourself.
I am an owner if I can exercise control over the software at hand. That's entirely my point - there is open source that a rando like me can hop in and improve, sometimes requiring difficult discussions about how to go about it exactly, but always with the experience of the user as a priority. (User can be an end user, but also a developer who's using an open source library/framework.)
And then there's "open source" where the code is accessible but the user experience takes a backseat to corporate interests, CLA requirements provide a one-sided transfer of copyrights, hobbyist contributions are systematically steamrolled by optimizing build pipelines and development processes for internal company use, and large-scale directions are decided in a private meeting room without involving community contributors.
If an inventor reserves some rights to control their invention for their own benefit, I have no problem with that. There's plenty of commercial software out there, people are working hard to provide value to customers, and I've been part of this system too.
Where I take issue is when we ask for special treatment of "open source" whose main purpose is to benefit commercial entities in doing business. Companies should figure out on their own how to keep their mission-critical software alive, that's their business. If Django suffers because lots of profitable outfits can't figure out a way to finance what they build upon, let them eat dust. They'll figure it out eventually when their services start falling behind on all fronts.
As a charitable coder, I'm going to invest my time into providing value for end users, not companies. That's the kind of open source we as a community/society should focus on supporting and financing. Imho.
You should be supporting and financing open source that elevates knowledge.
Knowledge is the resource that open source distributes which folks fight to control. It's like the fruit you'd grow on a farm. You could argue about whether or not the fruit should be distributed more to the city folk or the country folk, or ask questions about how much money the farm is making, but I'd say you should be focusing on getting the farm to grow more fruit, since that's the only way to be sure everyone becomes richer as a result.
Scientists do a great job discovering knowledge, but open source is what makes it useful and able to be used. Any open source project that's helping to elevate know-how is a project worth supporting.
Open source guarantees to me, the user, that competition among vendors will be possible and fair in the future. This is exactly the point that many "fake OSS" licenses try to take away. Okay, maybe it's possible to fork for personal on-prem use, but god forbid someone creates a competing hosted solution that gives any customer more choice. Furthermore, these pieces of software are fucked the day that the company folds, or gets acquired by a malevolent buyer.
Open source guarantees a baseline level of respect towards me, the end user. By letting anyone fork a project that's gone too far in the wrong direction, I know that my software will continue working in the short run and of it's important enough, a competing alternative will emerge that continues without one-sided money or data grabs.
There's nothing inherently wrong with having someone from Microsoft or Google work on open source software, or any VC-funded company that will without fail turn against their users sooner or later. However, if a controlling majority of developers is employed this way, it provides an opportunity for what elsewhere is known as regulatory capture. If Microsoft's goal is to make people dependent on proprietary GitLab and VS Code Marketplace offerings, and Google's goal is to provide the greatest possible amount of ads and tracking to the largest possible user base, it does not matter if the software is open source or not. The end result is the same, I'm left without viable alternatives and big business gets to do with us whatever the hell they please.
Especially when this software becomes ubiquitous and entrenched, paying developers to work on company-controlled OSS instead of community-driven, user-respecting OSS is a net negative for everyone in the long run.
I'm only interested in OSS in so far as it protects my interests as an end user, and/or our common interests as a society, now and in the future. The collaborative aspect is nice, but that's not the reason that we should ask for better compensation for maintainers.
The "Open Source" label as such is indeed meaningless per se, and it doesn't always protect me either, as seen with BSD+MIT software allowing cryptographically-enabled control of devices that I nominally own, or GPL being useless when there is no actual distribution of software involved. That said, I have yet to see a case of non-OSI "open source" that doesn't try to tilt the playing field in biased, controlling and long-term unsustainable or user-hostile ways.
If you can't build a business on a level playing field, perhaps it's in everyone's interest that your business and software dies, or retreats into lower-intensity hobbyist maintainership, instead of leading everyone into a hard dependency on your oh so well-intended monetization of originally useful software. Then at least someone else can take a shot at doing it better.