Thank you so much for taking the time to ask such questions @axivaz. And no worries I completely understand your English!
Such healthy criticism and questions are more than welcome!
So in short I believe opensource is a public good. True opensource. Like rotki. So any OSI approved license: The Open Source Definition – Open Source Initiative
There is other licenses which may allow for the code to be open but limit usage in various ways such as non-commercial etc. These are called “source available” instead of opensource.
The entire public good talks in crypto started from gitcoin. Gitcoin’s stated mission back in 2019 was to fund opensource development. A category which has been and still is something that is considered “impossible to do”. Later this changed to the more broad term public good, to include other projects non-software related.
But why is opensource software hard to fund? Why is is a public good? Because opensource can be copied, modified and redistributed. And that is even encouraged. It’s part of the very definition of open soure I pasted above!
In the traditional for-profit model a venture will not get funding if it does not have an IP. Opensource software is not IP since it can be copied. For example you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in development to create a piece of software and someone else can take that software, copy the code, repackage it and sell it. And that would be fine in all opensource licenses.
This is why VCs do not touch opensource code. They touch opensource protocols, since there is tokens and all the ponzinomics that come with them but for pure code they do not.
And to further cement my point about rotki specifically let me tell you a story. A German company created a portfolio tracking SaaS end of last year. And sold access to it for ~1k $ / month per user. Their code was closed. We had a look at how their app behaves and it was obvious from the start they were using rotki’s source code.
We confronted them. They admitted they were using our code but said they don’t need to respect the license. Our license is AGPL, which means you can use it, copy, redistribute, sell it, but you should also be opensource and give credit to the original authors (so rotki). They refused to do that. We hired a lawyer. Spent ~3k EUR and 2 months of going back and forth with lawyers. At the end they simply removed some features and claimed they were no longer using our code.
Our lawyer informed us this was the best case scenario and that we had no way of verifying anything. Did not really feel like a win. Why am I saying this? I am saying this to show you that even defending opensource licenses is hard and it falls on the opensource project. Projects that traditionally have no money to begin with. The idea is your code is out there, can be used by others and you are vulnerable and have to accept that fact or you have to not build opensource.
For all the above, opensource is a public good