Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

For some numbers - Diablo 3 was one of the best-selling AAA titles with 12 million copies sold in its first year, about 30 million within the first 3 years. The entire Civilization franchise has sold about 40 million copies - Civ 5 & 6 each sold about 8 million copies. At $50/copy, that's about $200M per game, ranging up to about $1.5B for a bestseller over multiple years.

By comparison, Wargaming (a mid-level F2P publisher of World of Tanks, World of Warships, and World of Warplanes) made about $600M in 2015. Fortnite (a bestselling F2P phenomena) made $2.4B in 2018. Pokemon Go (also a huge fad, but one now passe) made about $795M in 2018, and roughly $2B since launch.

The playerbase for these F2P games is more than an order of magnitude bigger than traditional AAA titles, so even though a large percentage players never pay, they still pull in roughly 2-4x what the traditional business model does.

(This is also what's driving the sky-high valuations of Twitch and Discord - all these players use related services even if they don't pay for the game itself. It's also interesting to compare this to movies - games are now comparable to or even exceeding blockbuster movies in revenue potential.)

business in the US has stopped paying for training, generally..

Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS.

Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it to build out their multi-billion dollar infrastructure moats, ensuring a barrier to entry no other will be able to partake in.

This is why cloud vendors have become so "OSS friendly" - they love the status quo as they've become the primary beneficiaries from everyone developing and distributing OSS for free as long as they're able to collect the rent when it gets hosted in the end.

You're starting to see the conflicts as more companies like Redis Labs, Elastic, Confluent and MongoDB who realize this and start distributing their future investments under "OSS free that's free for everyone else but can't be used commercially by cloud vendors" as a way to force licensing so Cloud vendors are unable to use their own investments to compete against them - and force some revenue share back from when Customers pay for OSS, when they host it.

So when you hear how much cloud companies "love OSS" and how their initiatives like "Open Distro for Elasticsearch" is to ensure it stays open, know that they're not doing it out of altruism, it's to repackage Elastic's OSS investments and make it available for free so they can be hosted on AWS without having to host with Elastic, it effectively lets them avoid licensing and revenue sharing back to the companies who've invested their time and resources into developing it.

One thing I'm not seeing here is people giving freely simply because you created something they value. You will never become a billionaire through this mechanism but I suspect you can probably earn a decent living.

The problem with this mechanism is that now each project is out on their own to advertise their needs and get donations. I'm actually experimenting in this space with SeedAndDew (https://www.seedanddew.com). My hypothesis is that if you can give people the ability to set a specific amount to open source that automatically goes to the right places, more people will contribute. Just went full-time to see this through so early days but I'm optimistic.

Possibly ... not right now though. First I need it to be successful before I start worrying about those issues.

If someone were to do that now I would be amazed... honestly and would just want to work with them :)

The license is GPL and the backend infra might not be open. Trying to still figure that part out.

It depends on whether the community steps up and wants to keep it open.