Closed source makes most people see us as enemies (do you like paying people for software?)

People actually do like paying for software. People will spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on nonfree software in the form of video games and other related software licences throughout their life. What people don't like is non-ownership and the vulnerability of nonfree software that inevitably leads to abuse given enough time. People also don't like their money being placed in the pockets of not the working class software engineers but in the executives and managers who have full control of the project despite not having even a fraction of the technical expertise to maintain it. Capitalists don't like being cheated by other capitalists so their support of free software goes as far as to be a cost cutting measure to out-compete other businesses.

In other words, why should I buy a software license if the person who actually provided the labor for the program I'm using has virtually no job security or rights and instead my money goes to the manager who laid that person off when corporate line didn't go up (a common parable).

For us small businesses who aim our investments like precious bullets, leaking work and effort is unacceptable. Breaking the market is great, but we cannot afford to subsidize our competitors.

Computer Science but all the benefits that computers can give to humanity must be gatekept in the FREE MARKET. That's why we have broken, buggy software that repeats the same problems and issues solved decades ago or grifts designed to cheat people out of their money or take over existing industries (a la Uber or Doordash). This isn't the point that the author is making but I just found this line interesting to comment on.

Ultimately this is a good write-up on why copyleft is superior to permissive licenses in most cases. In reality, most projects will never be as successful as ZeroMQ and will only have 1-2 other contributors. Using a permissive license to "attract" contributors isn't a compelling reason to allow the software you created to be used in proprietary programs.

Lastly, sales and commercial mediation are important. There is a natural market between expert contributors and customers, but both are somewhat incompetent at talking to each other. Customers assume that support is free or very cheap because the software is free. Contributors are shy at asking a fair rate for their work. It makes for a difficult market. A growing part of my work and my firm’s profits is simply connecting ZeroMQ users who want help with experts from the community able to provide it, and ensuring both sides are happy with the results.

I actually really like this a lot, I think there's this idea that free software is all volunteer driven work (a lot of it is) but I feel like a system of monetary incentives (say like a bounty system for fixing bugs, implementing feature requests etc) would go a long way. To organize these monetary incentives you would then have to create a well functioning governing body to coordinate the trajectory of the project as well as have sponsors. We already have platforms like Liberapay so sponsoring/contracting work for a free software project would be beneficial. No one really has to pay for the "right" to use the software in the Freeworld but compensating labor costs should become a big focus outside of typical donation runs.