There is nothing wrong with using FOSS without contributing. You can’t have any expectations if you don’t contribute, but it’s not mooching, it’s a fundamental component of Open Source licensing.
OSS exists in society and contributes to society and is developed by individuals who need to get paid.
OSS is not volunteerism, it’s a legal framework to ensure that everyone benefits from the communal effort.
Billionaires have made trillions of dollars off the back of that and still those same developers are struggling to eat.
So, no. I disagree strongly with your assessment and the inventor of OSS does too, Bruce Perens is attempting to address this inequity with his Post Open project.
Excellent.
Will they be paying for developers, or just mooch off the open source community like everyone else does?
There is nothing wrong with using FOSS without contributing. You can’t have any expectations if you don’t contribute, but it’s not mooching, it’s a fundamental component of Open Source licensing.
With that said, the government of the Netherlands is already doing a decent job of supporting FOSS.
Yes there is.
OSS exists in society and contributes to society and is developed by individuals who need to get paid.
OSS is not volunteerism, it’s a legal framework to ensure that everyone benefits from the communal effort.
Billionaires have made trillions of dollars off the back of that and still those same developers are struggling to eat.
So, no. I disagree strongly with your assessment and the inventor of OSS does too, Bruce Perens is attempting to address this inequity with his Post Open project.
See: postopen.org
You should see how often US software companies outsource their dev to other countries rather than having to pay US salaries.