Honest, I'm not overlooking it. There are three basic options for someone who's going to invest time and effort in fielding a website. You can:
Anyone who is going to carry the big ball is going to want to make money. That's either advertising, or selling user's information; it sure ain't gonna happen on donations (see: FReepathon). So it stops being like FR from the git-go.
I believe that a potential licensee would look at FR software and see that they have lots of work to do, to make it scalable to a large level, and featureful and monetizable so that it competes with the other modern-looking sites, and they'll say, if we have to do all that work, why license something that needs work (#3), we'll just write our own (#2).
I'm not overlooking your argument. I'm saying the McDonalds analogy doesn't hold. FR's software isn't hamburgers. I believe that licensing FR software just doesn't make business sense for the licensee.
But that's just my opinion. See if you can get JimRob to license JohnRob's software to you, and take a run at it. If it makes business sense, you'll be able to make that case and get a loan or venture capital to make it happen.
Good luck. Really, no /sarc. I'm always willing to be proven wrong.
I doubt I could make it work, because I’m not a software dude I’m a hardware dude.
But Trump could make it work. Why not accept his money and nod at him when he winks at us in the future?
The key to making it work isn’t to add more features to the software hamburger. It is to keep features to a minimum and retain that lightning fast loadup speed that FR retains.