I'm not confused at all, I've been making a living from the FLOSS DAW I've been developing for the last 24+ years.
There is tension between "free to distribute" (which implies you can get it without paying), as well as "free to modify" (which implies you can build it yourself from source) and "the need to ensure that development continues".
But it is only a tension, not a contradiction. Anyone can get Ardour without paying, yet it raises $200k+ per year to help ensure that development continues.
To this day the single most successful open source business model is the SQLite Consortium's. Their approach is to make the codebase open source (public domain even) and the test suite proprietary. Having a fantastic test suite that is proprietary acts to blunt the community's ability to fork the project, and it encourages those who want new features to pay for consortium membership because the team can't easily accept outside contributions (because in order to do so the team has to write tests for those outside contributions). It's brilliant!
It is an amazing model! I think it works well because it's a library that is "infrastructure" / "support" for other systems though (browsers, android)
I wonder if it applies to the kind of software that is more complete like anything with a UI etc. If I get the final result the tests don't mean much to me.
Well, it applies to very popular software. SQLite3 is probably the most popular software ever written. This really might be a special case. But it probably would work for things like: OpenSSL, PostgreSQL, Java, Rust, and a few others. Most if not all of those don't need to change models, which leaves newer / less popular projects, and for those to bootstrap this model is difficult. It might be that the SQLite model is unique -- that it won't be repeated much or at all.
I wish you well, Paul, and I'm glad that you're making open source work. I was just saying that what Bruce Perens is suggesting isn't open source.
In fact, what Bruce is proposing is a "source under glass" license. Look, but don't touch. Pay to play. Microsoft offers some companies access to the Microsoft Windows source under that kind of license. Is it open source? No.
There is tension between "free to distribute" (which implies you can get it without paying), as well as "free to modify" (which implies you can build it yourself from source) and "the need to ensure that development continues".
But it is only a tension, not a contradiction. Anyone can get Ardour without paying, yet it raises $200k+ per year to help ensure that development continues.