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

20 years ago, large chunks of "the web hosting industry" sold access to Linux/Apache/Sendmail/Postfix/BIND/vsftpd/Perl/PHP/MySQL/etc - often (at least in my part of the game) using paid-for WHM/CPanel or Plesk to manage all those.

While I sympathise with Mongo/Redis/Elastic et al, who're having their work packaged up and sold by Amazon/Microsoft/Google in their cloud offerings, I don't recall any outcry about all the open source projects local ISPs and CPanel/Plesk hosting companies bundled up and charged customers access for. I don't remember the authors of Linux, Apache/Sendmail et al complaining about "not getting paid" for their OSS.

I get it that the world has changed, and companies building the OSS they're built on wasn't so much of a thing back then (although MySQL is an example of that from 20+ years back...), but I'm not sure a choice by founders to invest significant resources writing OSS is a reason other companies should not be able to use software with he same licenses in the same way companies have been using it for decades.

I've super curious to see if these new category of licenses work out business-wise, I suspect if they do (which I'm not completely confident they will), that it'll allow development of software on a scale and complexity which the "scratch your own itch" OSS community couldn't tackle. There are almost certainly software project for which the initial coding curve is so steep and high that nobody is going to start working on them in their spare time or as an unofficial skunkworks project or 20% time project at work. It the _only_ people tackling large complex problems as "open source" (in a loose interpretation here) are PhD students, there'll be less amazing software created than if companies like Mongo/Redis/Elastic can pay teams of devs to work on software which while not "FSF certified open source", is still usable and understandable by others in ways that proprietary software is not. I could debug my not-technically-OSS Mongo problems, unlike my Oracle problems. That's not rms's vision of the future. But at least it's not Larry Ellison's either...

A world where front ends are deployed on a CDN and the back ends are all containers is very commodity driven. Also infrastructure being set up with code on platforms that target multiple providers like Terraform provides more ability to move systems.

It'll be really interesting to see if AWS can keep their margins in such a world.

Given that MS make huge amounts of money from email and have virtual lock in on corporate email it's very possible, but on the other hand perhaps it won't happen if everyone is, as they tend to be, using open frameworks and generally open systems.

The reason this works is that once you have a large user-base you can get people to buy your services because you have now developed a stickiness with your customer-base.

Exhibit A: Hashicorp. People started using Vagrant, the user-based expanded. When they moved onto other pay-services, people followed.

The reality is that developers want 'free' stuff they can build with but IT/Ops wants 'pay' services where they get 24/7 support, consulting, etc etc.

No company will be fully OSS because no money = no company. However I can see many orgs support OSS as a customer engagement tool to drive their brand and get a user base that they can drive towards other products.