> You're making more of a criticism of advertising as a business model than of free software.
I’m saying that if your business model is free software, it needs to be monetized some other way. Advertising is one way, which has become common. How that happens needs to be part of the public interest analysis.
> if your business model is free software, it needs to be monetized some other way
Mutual self-interest is a good, solid business model. JPEG was developed long ago by a bunch of companies who needed a good, standard image format. Now AV1 is being developed by a bunch of companies who want to use less bandwidth for the video and will save truckloads of money not paying patent license fees. Not to mention standarization, economies of scale, and interoperability benefits.
A company simply not having to pay the fees for something proprietary can be all the funding needed to support a free software version.
Free software development generally only needs about 1/10th as much monetization to begin with. You may get to start with the works of other people; others using your work builds the user base quickly without paying to advertise and sell your product; you'll get a lot of free testing/debugging/code feedback; etc.
Rather than monetize the software, fund its creators. They, along with everyone else, get great use value out of the software and they are empowered to live, live, do, play, and generally be.
Valve is a great example of this. Aside from just shipping Proton as a single layer to manage the various compatibility libraries involved with playing Windows games on Linux, they've also hired multiple developers that were already working on projects like DXVK and Zink because of how their platform benefits from the underlying enhancements to Vulkan as an ecosystem.
Users and supporters do. And they make the money to pay however they usually do.
They may also make money using the software to do whatever it is other people will pay for. That is the case for one project I contribute to on Pateron. Use value is real high and a community of users is funding the developer.
I am supporting a couple of other projects that way right now. I've got good developers on Patreon, and I'm happy to know that they're developing the software that I value. That's the end of it.
I'm also happy to know that software is out there for general use too. I don't really care if everyone's paying. Would I do care about is the developers are getting paid.
I think more developers should communicate where they are at in terms of support, and I think a whole lot more of us need to put small amounts of money toward making sure those developers are okay.
I’m saying that if your business model is free software, it needs to be monetized some other way. Advertising is one way, which has become common. How that happens needs to be part of the public interest analysis.