We decided that getting people to pay for software was a fool's game. Open source was the bait. "Figure out a different business model" they said. If open source as a concept had come from Wall Street and not academia, it would have been rejected. Charging people money for things has been how things worked since the concept of money was invented. The real conversation is that we, as software developers, are not good at money. The best software gets taken over by money and business folk. Oracle, VMware, Splunk, and Datadog all come to mind as companies charging huge amounts of money for software that don't sell ads (but are too expensive). But they do not make money by selling ads.