I believe open source is approximately an order of magnitude larger than it would be if developers controlled their own purchasing. What FOSS introduced was the ability to use software without someone with a little power saying no, you can’t, because we won’t pay for it.
Jetbrains threaded this needle for years by having professional licenses tied to an individual with clauses for time and location shifting. So you could use their software at home, drive to work and also use the same license there.
And they priced it at around the cost of three tech books per year, which it is at least that useful for productivity. I suspect we would be in better shape now if others had copied their model. Rather than the (defunct) Microsoft model of ignoring home piracy and demanding commercial licenses from any company large enough to make it economical to fire off a cease and desist to them and demand back pay.
> Jetbrains threaded this needle for years by having professional licenses tied to an individual with clauses for time and location shifting. So you could use their software at home, drive to work and also use the same license there.
It's a very, er, "enlightened self-interest" model, because it makes me "sticky" as a customer, since I'm less likely to learn a completely different IDE for work and then use that one for my own projects and eventually ditch theirs.
Jetbrains threaded this needle for years by having professional licenses tied to an individual with clauses for time and location shifting. So you could use their software at home, drive to work and also use the same license there.
And they priced it at around the cost of three tech books per year, which it is at least that useful for productivity. I suspect we would be in better shape now if others had copied their model. Rather than the (defunct) Microsoft model of ignoring home piracy and demanding commercial licenses from any company large enough to make it economical to fire off a cease and desist to them and demand back pay.