Mind that this doesn't mean that they are not commercialized - modern console emulators make a lot of money on patreon(in some cases up to $80k a month) for "private builds" that can run certain games, especially newer ones, better, and online features in some cases.
Which is how it should be, IMO - the base model is available to anyone for free. If you want extra features after using the base model, then a small donation to the developers for their time is a worthwhile tradeoff.
The problem is that it then gives the developer weird incentives. If someone in the community decides to build the same feature that the main developer kept as a paid feature, then the main developer won't want to merge it into their version.
Then you're stuck: the community member could certainly fork the project with their new feature, or maintain a patchset and forward-port to each new version of the original software, but both of those things are a ton of work.
Meanwhile, users are the ones who lose out; someone decided to build the feature and give it away for free, but users have to jump through hoops to use it.
As someone who has done a lot of open source work over the past ~20 years, I don't think anyone is entitled to find a business model in there. Sure, if you can find a way to work on your project full time but still support yourself, that's great. But often the ways people do so make for some (IMO) bad trade offs and perverse incentives.
I like the dual-licensing approach, where commercial users need to pay, but that's not workable for all projects.
Or once the new feature is paid for... then release it.
Someone has paid for your time (to develop the feature).
They get their feature, (which they need enough to part with money), the community gets it too (whether they need it or not)
It doesnt benefit from the massive scale revenue, but if it's paid for your time...
I imagine the logic here would be developing a passive income to compensate for the free labor you put in in the first place, and cover whatever future free labor you might want to do.
> The problem is that it then gives the developer weird incentives. If someone in the community decides to build the same feature that the main developer kept as a paid feature, then the main developer won't want to merge it into their version.
See VirtualBox, and to some extent Chrome. For VirtualBox, I'm sure that the Extension Pack could be covered with an open-source effort by the community, and in the case of Chrome, their refusal to accept *BSD patches.
yuzu, a Switch emulator, had introduced network play support a while ago that was gated behind Patreon subscriptions but was subsequently removed. https://yuzu-emu.org/entry/yuzu-x-raptor/
IIRC, for a while cemu (a Wii U emulator) had builds with support for Breath of the Wild gated behind Patreon early access as well.
