Financing what comes after Open Source

Or at least, I'm trying very hard. When I was younger, I was super happy about all the gifts that I received from anonymous strangers through the Debian package repository.

Then I had a phase where I tried to contribute to and publish my own open source software. I got horribly ripped of by companies, multiple times, in some instances they even sent their paying customers to my private email for support inquiries, so I got unpleasant insults and thinly veiled threats by random strangers who thought they were paying for my open source software and I was the asshole.

Then I stopped doing any Open Source for a while.

And now I feel like we urgently need a new way of financing software for the common good, like Thunderbird, Wine, and maybe one day a Linux file manager that feels as intuitive to use as the Mac Finder. The world could also really use a desktop GUI framework to replace those pesky Electron apps. 128 MB of RAM used to be enough for a snappy coding IDE. But it looks like recently every infrastructure-level Open Source project is effectively fighting for survival because it gets turned into a hyperscaler cloud service and then nobody donates to its development, despite astronomical user counts. The last defense that still worked was AGPL, but with AI "re-implementation", that won't help anymore.

And that's why I strongly feel like we need to find a way to build trustworthy closed-source apps for the common good. Like where regular everyday non-technical people spend a few dollars a month to help support software that makes their everyday life better. (As opposed to being digital hostages in services that sell them as the product to be advertised into buying useless junk.)