> I mean, after all, they've made billions from this code.

As someone whose dream job is to just build open source software and have a comfortable life, I'm highly sympathetic to open source sustainability and I do hope we continue to seek for solutions.

But this type of statement is ridiculous. There is a hell of a lot more to business than just the code, despite what many of us software engineers want to think. It's also quite rare for a commercial company to airlift an open source project and make billions on it. There is also a massive spectrum/range of open source, from tiny nearly throwaway libraries up to massive applications.

Turning open source into commercial software is NOT the solution. Commercial software has existed forever, and continues to (try doing something non-trivial with PDFs if you want a modern painful example). If open source becomes commercial software, we'd be losing out on a mountain of greatness. Imagine if downloading a Linux distro required paying for and receiving a license? And if you want to make a distro, be prepared to buy licenses for OpenSSL and every little thing that makes up that system, and set up your accounting books and what not so you can properly distribute all your revenues to the thousands (or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands) of sub-projects. And don't forget that you also have to have technical/legal apparati capable of enforcing, maybe auditing, etc.

Nothing is stopping you from spinning your open source project into a commercial operation right now. Plenty of people do it (it's usually called "source available" because you largely have to, by necessity, restrict redistribution, which makes it no longer "open source" according to most definitions of said term). The great thing about freedom and choice is that you can go whichever direction you want.