Paying for software or software support is a genuine hurdle:
- Ads
- Sell user data
- Subscription fee
- Donations
Article ultimately focuses on 4 wanting to make it a social norm. I think this is wishful thinking. Businesses need hard legal or financial incentives to do anything. Adding a (stronger) tax break could work, but now you've added complexity to the tax code which means more loopholes. Suddenly paying for android is "teeeechnically" open source and you get abuse.
Seems like this is a solvable problem though.