The basic difficulty inherent in monetizing digital goods is affecting all reaches of the software industry, in a bad way. From websites being forced to rely on advertising to system software developers being forced to rely on donations or patronage--the digital goods economy is here, and frankly it's pretty disappointing.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but the first step I think is to admit that you've got a problem. Supply chains in the physical goods world aren't a piece of cake by any means, but at least they are predictable. If you make an SSD, you buy flash from Micron and a controller form Marvell, etc. You just buy it. That simple "money for product" transaction allows the incentives to line up. If it was possible to make money selling SSL libraries the same way it's possible to make money selling flash controllers, the world might be a better place.
Honestly I think the answer is micropayments. Large companies should get together to fund the creation and running of a centralized payment system with no fees. They could move tiny sums of money around to developers. Apps could charge $0.05/month to $1/month to monetize themselves. The user would be given a trial period and then asked to pay.
The way I see it, Google, Amazon, Walmart and others would create a small firm of about 10 people. The central processing system could probably handle real traffic with as little as 20 production servers. All tolled, the company would cost probably 10 mill a year. The benefit is that the founding companies would save in transaction fees their contribution to the new monetary commons. If Amazon didn't lose 3% to credit card purchases, they would save billions a year. At that point what is 10 mill to keep that going? Hell, if I'm off by an order of magnitude, 100 mill a year is still cheaper than the fees.
That's basically what the author is pushing. Snowdrift.coop[1] is a platform for making small payments to open source projects, with the additional twist of a matching donation mechanism. It's like Patreon with a twist. They plan to fun the platform as a project on the platform, rather than charging a percentage of each transaction like KickStarter does.
I like the idea. If something like this caught on, it would give corporations a centralized place to support open source tools they rely on.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but the first step I think is to admit that you've got a problem. Supply chains in the physical goods world aren't a piece of cake by any means, but at least they are predictable. If you make an SSD, you buy flash from Micron and a controller form Marvell, etc. You just buy it. That simple "money for product" transaction allows the incentives to line up. If it was possible to make money selling SSL libraries the same way it's possible to make money selling flash controllers, the world might be a better place.