> Unfortunately, as someone else in the thread has mentioned, the ways of monetizing OSS misalign the incentives between user and developer, and they haven't really been very successful anyway.
Many ways of monetizing it don't misalign incentives. As a user, I don't value support less just because software is more reliable; on the contrary, I trust the software in higher-value contexts because it's reliable, and in those contexts I need the support more. I don't value "host this for me" less just because the software is easy to install and configure (because I still don't want to be the system administrator if I don't have to). And "please develop this feature for me" has great alignment of incentives.
> However, it's really hard to foster an ecosystem when companies who extract millions of dollars of value from FOSS don't feel like they need to give back.
You're a lot less likely to get paid for software that's under an all-permissive license (e.g. MIT or Apache or BSD). It's unfortunate that so much of the ecosystem has settled around permissive licenses; with such licenses, your best strategy for making money may be "use the software to get hired somewhere or to build reputation for consulting". There's a reason companies love permissive licensing, and subtly (or unsubtly) discourage copyleft. Strong copyleft gives you more options to monetize something, either now or in the future.
That said, I also do agree that there need to be more good ways of funding Open Source.
