Wrong solution to the wrong problem

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.