<i>making any proprietary stuff impossible to sell.</i><p>That is the end goal, right?  Your margin is my opportunity.  The problem in the middle is: open source software is considered free-as-in-never-pay-me free.<p>I have multibillion dollar companies using some of my open source software.  They&#x27;ve never paid me anything.  They ask for bug fixes and feature improvements that would take me six months (or more) of full time work.  They don&#x27;t offer to pay (or then even balk at the thought), they just keep saying &quot;you should support us for free because it&#x27;s open source.&quot;<p>Part of the &quot;we won&#x27;t&#x2F;can&#x27;t pay&quot; is due to programmers being very low status people in organizations.  Programmers don&#x27;t have budgets to buy anything because &quot;lol free open source&quot; and &quot;it&#x27;s just code, do whatever.&quot;  If programmers could allocate resources towards getting features&#x2F;fixes they need from external projects, the software world could be more... synergistic.