When I worked for the UK Government I was once asked if we could find a way to pay for all the Open Source Software we were using. It is a surprisingly hard problem and I want to talk about some of the issues we faced. The UK Government publishes a lot of Open Source code - nearly everything developed in-house by the state is available under an OSI Approved licence. The UK is generally pretty…
I think a good compromise is to include an open source maintenance fee on projects when used in a corporate or for-profit environment. Another option I like is to offer business support as a subscription.
It doesn’t need to be super-expensive, but at least that would ensure some continuity for development.