Incentives are what they are. You can't sell free open source software as being desirably for being free and then struggle with people expecting to use the software without paying for it.

Complaining about lack of public financial support is not a particularly effective way to go about this. If the problem is funding the solution is public grants, side businesses, sponsorships, foundations and institutional support, not humanity suddenly sprouting a newfound desire to pay for things they can get for free, or for the things they buy or use to be functional.

You are conflating the meanings of the word “free”.

The intended freedom for open source software is not related to finance, it’s related to legal rights.

This is fundamentally why open source struggles with a broader acceptance and why corporate interests continue to exploit the open source community.

Ultimately, the notion that software can be developed without money is both absurd and unsustainable.

I’m not blaming you for this common misunderstanding.

There is no misunderstanding, I'm well aware.

The answer to that is, "well, then sell it". If it's not free, sell it for a price tag. Will get rid of that notion right away.

Also make everything worse by having pirated versions full of malware everywhere and people defaulting to non-paid alteratives.

The problem you have is all of this is made freely available as donationware, so it shouldn't be a surprise WinRAR monetization rules apply.

Also, I didn't say "software can be developed without money". I listed like half a dozen of sources of money that can be used instead of (or more accurately alongside) individual donations and purchases of nonfunctional products. You are arguing with a misconception of a misconception, certainly not with the point I made.

Imo, probably the best way forward is some kind if SaaS model. Either like Red Hat where the software is open source and you pay for support, or else standalone software where you pay for access to an already running instance on the company’s server rather than hosting your own (with maybe a noncompete clause in the license?).

But you’ll still run into two problems in funding. Which is that first, most people care less about their data being sold than they care about not having to whip out their credit card. And second, that if you are doing a good, honest job of providing software to people without locking them in, ripping them off, or selling their data, then you probably won’t get any venture capital funding - so less scrupulous competitors will likely establish market dominance with a slicker product (in the short term, at least).