Wrong solution to the wrong problem

Sure. The problem is that in some areas, the itches are too deep and/or require too much specialized knowledge and/or professional training / education.

For instance, consider why we don't have an open-source drafting program that an architect might want to use professionally. (No, FreeCAD doesn't count.)

For most people, if they can't monetise their free software project then it has to remain a part-time occupation at most while they work a paid full-time job to support themselves. That is problematic, because a lot of valuable projects demand more effort than that. Where would we be if Linus had to hold down a full-time not-Linux job and could only work on Linux during evenings and weekends when he wasn't too tired?

I've been around a long time and I've seen very few cases of talented but venal software developers messing up projects they joined "for the wrong reasons". You get problematic contributors but they're much more often motivated by pride than money.

I do too, I'm pragmatic about it but my preference is toward FOSS whenever it meets requirements.

> I don't think funding it is necessarily a good way to encourage that, in practice. Most good free software comes from people wanting to scratch itches

Everyone doing FOSS work is funded in some way, developers aren't homeless monks living in communes, they have jobs, they eat food, sleep under a roof, which costs money. So the question is _who's_ itch is being scratched, often the case is that its an _employer_, Linux kernel is a perfect example of that, the Linux Foundation is a vendor consortium where large private corporations coordinate their efforts.

> I don't think it's right to try to create social pressure when they're not doing anything wrong. There is nothing wrong with "taking advantage" of a public good without contributing back. That's the whole point of free software!

Public good doesn't come about magically, it's intentionally created, subsidized and maintained or it atrophies and goes away, at some level it's self-destructive for large corporations to extract large monetary value from freely-provided software without maintaining the conditions that allow that software to be created in the first place. Putting social pressure on takers (or legal pressure like the GPL) to encourage them to contribute to the well-being of the environment that allows them to profit is the mildest form of pressure there is, a stronger form would tax profits at a level which pays for UBI so that developers really could work on whatever they wanted, scratch whatever itch, take risks, without worrying about their standard of living.

No software is free to *make* as that devalues human labor which is not provided for free, its always paid for in some way, we can be explicit and intentional about how that happens.