The reality is open source developers tend to maintain multiple projects at the same time, and a small set of them can be monetized with this.
I think monetizing those, targeted to large companies who can easily afford it and would happily pay a few bucks to use the software (they would likely burn more money in a meeting discussing whether to adopt the said software or to switch to a free alternative) is a good trade-off if it allows indie open source developers to pay their bills.
On the long term those developers will generate much more open source output than when working as employees somewhere and creating only proprietary software all day and struggling to create open source only when they have some spare time a couple of hours a month.
In addition, all this licensezero software will be developed in the open, which brings many of the practical benefits of open source to a vast majority of the users, and the open source ecosystem will grow as a side effect that the developers will also create other software distributed under ordinary open source licenses.
I think monetizing those, targeted to large companies who can easily afford it and would happily pay a few bucks to use the software (they would likely burn more money in a meeting discussing whether to adopt the said software or to switch to a free alternative) is a good trade-off if it allows indie open source developers to pay their bills.
On the long term those developers will generate much more open source output than when working as employees somewhere and creating only proprietary software all day and struggling to create open source only when they have some spare time a couple of hours a month.
In addition, all this licensezero software will be developed in the open, which brings many of the practical benefits of open source to a vast majority of the users, and the open source ecosystem will grow as a side effect that the developers will also create other software distributed under ordinary open source licenses.