If Oxwall as a whole added more of the necessary things to their site such as improved mobile support, mobile app support, and extended features such as pages, advanced admin tools, etc., than it would definitely be worth being premium software. Not to say it shouldn't be it now, but the way core Oxwall currently stands, if it was premium only I wouldn't throw more than $100 at it, even if there were support plans involved.

If they took it and did what they did with Skadate: offer mobile apps, setup, a bunch of always-updated and extendable features and admin tools, than yeah it'd definitely be worth it. I guess you could say Skadate is the premium Oxwall afterall.

Skadate is $1600 or so

Open source software isn't really the problem. Companies that work on WordPress, for instance, make quite a lot of money.

It's mostly about management when it comes to Oxwall. There are no real active contributors outside of Skalfa, and even they aren't actively working on Oxwall. There needs to be incentive for other developers to start contributing, but that's very unlikely to happen.

Making Oxwall some exclusive, paid software isn't going to fix any of the problems it's having as a whole. If anything, it'd likely make things worse.