Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to

Open source economics is framed as an evolutionarily stable strategy: closed source behaves like an aggressive competitor that captures profit, while permissive open source behaves like a cooperative strategy that captures adoption. The market equilibrium that emerges is "anybody may use this for anything, including commercially, for free" (MIT/BSD/Apache). Repeated examples show that attempts to make licenses less permissive lose to forks and cheaper alternatives - React relicensed to MIT after BSD+Patents was rejected; Elasticsearch and OpenSearch; Terraform and OpenTofu; Redis and the Valkey fork - so freeing code wins market share while closed models concentrate profit.

That free layer, however, runs on unpaid labor and burnout. Roughly 60% of maintainers receive no pay and many work alone; about 60% have quit or considered quitting. Large-scale audits find only ~11% of projects actively maintained, and a tiny number of developers produce the bulk of critical code; replacing open source would cost an estimated $8.8 trillion. High-profile failures like the xz backdoor illustrate the risk. Every attempted fix - tips and sponsors (GitHub Sponsors ~$100M), foundations (few direct payouts), corporate pledges, paid-security startups, limited government funds, and alternative licenses - moves money but remains voluntary charity and hasn’t changed the equilibrium that leaves maintenance underfunded.