Okay, say you or your team decided to share your piece of technology to GitHub. You create a free open-source software (FOSS!?) with permissive license (like MIT license? I'm not sure), got some popularity going on for both end-users and contributors. At some point, to have the software to keep up with the industry requires money to keep going. Your full-time jobs isn't enough to follow the pace, and maybe the idea of donation and sponsors rises up. Now, at that point, say somehow there are some end-users who are high profile using your software that gets millions of dollars out of it, maybe some other groups also create a better/variant version of that to catch their niche market, assuming that the license allows them, and did not pay you a thing. No donations, no sponsors, not even code contributions. How do you feel? What will you do?

The idea is I'm trying to understand the sustainability of a free open-source software. When I was a web developer, there are some third-party tools that I pull when I use Node.js. At some point some die out to a point its security is kinda questionable due to it just being outdated. Why they're stopped updating, I'm not sure either. Maybe it's life. So all you have left is expecting money to keep them running, but you don't even force it, to keep maybe I don't know, the foundation to stay strong and alive? Do you really need to actively beg the big money to help you? Or things just flow to you just because it's the most popular in the entire open-source world? or you just hand it over just because you can't handle it anymore? For example, Blender seems to be sustainable and I honestly not sure how, and I'd love to know that.

Yes, you described a long-known problem, even before the modern F/OSS movement.

Big companies pull from small projects, either pay nothing or very little, and build tremendous projects on their back. While it is within the license, it often is outside the spirit as they give nothing back.

Occasionally one enters the news with a global event of some type, but it is generally unnoticed.

But you also mentioned Blender.

Blender was a different beast, it was private, part of a company that was broke and being dissolved. Enough people knew about the program there was a public outcry to sell it to a foundation to become free software rather rotting in a business collapse. They had a campaign for 100,000 to go towards the company debts and buy it. After many people paid (including me) they reached the goal and the code and tech were purchased.

Yeah I think that's exactly how it often felt. F/OSS feels like giving it all to the community, but in reality it's hard to get something back when it comes to business.

Also I honestly didn't know Blender started off as a commercial software until you told me. I searched about it on wiki and it seems like a long way of them. They really deserve it.

There are some things that you could try. Some licences are more strict. See for example, the Gnu Public Licence (GPL). Not the Lesser (LGPL) one. In some ways, it forbids it to be used with non free software, thus it could prevent big companies to use it.

If you couple this with paying services (ie for customer helpdesk), you might be able to have some sustainability.

Another option is to do it the way Qt is doing it. Have dual licences.

Any other popular example that uses non-lesser GPL, other than one of Qt license? I know some open source software but not really about their specific licenses they use. Also what “used with” here means? Integration with other code (non-free closed source?), or including the result that is used by a non-free software? Anyway I just assume the licenses play the tricks here. I've been looking too much “MIT” licenses perhaps, not that I'm pretty much aware specifically what it does other than being a super free license out there, assuming I'm right. I have to check that thoroughly as well as this GPL thing. Will also check on Qt's.

I agree on the paying services, hmm, I just assume it works best for a big monolithic software rather than a small yet useful library? Say like a 3D importer/exporter dll?

Big companies use GPL internally without sharing anything. The terms only apply to released software.

A common, typical example is modified web servers and back-end scrips. They can use them to serve pages but because they are not releasing it as a product, only using it as an internal tool to create output, they are never forced to make their code public despite the viral nature of the license.