People are not producing superior products for free out of their good will. And these are often not so superior either. It is a simple balancing game of a good enough tool vs a good enough vendor lock-in.
Donations do not work and developers should not be forced to beg.
FOSS is a broken model for all of us. At the end of the day you are feeding the behemoths one way or another.
That is completely delusional. I am sorry to say this but promoting FOSS as an alternative to anything is to put it simply ignorant. Have not we learned from the OpenSSL fiasco ? Have not we done the same mistake with openjdk? Who do you think is paying for openjdk development ? Donations ? Dont make me laugh. These devs are not even earning an average wages for Europe not talking about avg salaries in the Tech Sector for the US.
Filing bugs wont bring food on the table. Filing bugs wont pay for your electricity bills.
I’d love to hear about your myriad of ways companies profit out of making their software FOSS. For not so trivial things the contribution is minimal (think compilers) see eg RubyMotion.
Free software was once necessary to balance out the astronomical costs of enterprise software. But this is not the case anymore.
Free software is in this day and age not sustainable and using it it without contributing a dime is parasitic and detrimental to the health of the sw industry.
A lot of so called “free” software is alive and kicking strong because it is funded by mega corporations doing it to kill the smaller competition.
In a sense using VS Code or VS Codium is just as bad as relying on an obscure SAP module.
We should all support small and medium sized SMEs like the creators of Sublime Text.