While the software itself may be free and open, often the authors of the software provide consulting & professional services around the implementation of the software. If the software in question has a primarily commercial purpose, I can see this conflict of interest confusing authorities.
Open Source is a widely used marketing and product strategy used to gain traction &market share and make substantial capital gains by the owners Github, MongoDB and many other start-ups.
It's not clear to me any of this is "non-profit" by default.
If some of society has benefitted and the organization has not made a profit from those benefits, then I'd say that the non-profit claim is valid and we are all better off for it.
There are tons of people who use MongoDB without paying MongoDB(Tengen) a penny.
Even though I totally understand the IRS concerns, eliminating this benefit creates a disincentive for the commons, and we are all poorer because of it.
I think one of the metrics that could be used here to determine full or partial non-profit status is the community around a piece of software. The active community is a representative, albeit biased/skewed, sample of the entire community using the open source software in question. Polling these unrelated parties (i.e. there is no contractual obligation between them and the software producing entity beyond a commonly accepted open source license) should be sufficient to figure out if an organization should qualify for non-profit status.
Open Source is a widely used marketing and product strategy used to gain traction &market share and make substantial capital gains by the owners Github, MongoDB and many other start-ups.
It's not clear to me any of this is "non-profit" by default.