I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one

We all know the horrors and pain of trying to raise a PO to get a license for a really useful / necessary piece of software.

I fundamentally guarantee that if React needed a 0.01 cent license for every internal and external installation it would have four users globally.

FOSS short circuits this gatekeeping function - and it is only popular because it is hard to keep track of and easy to load up npm and grab 900 libraries.

Imagine there was a FOSS plug-in everyone used, call it mothership that on every install (and indeed invocation) it routed back a simple packet to say "i am alive and used on this machine in this domain in this company" (let's call it a common piece of config like git email config)

Immediately every legal department would soil their pants and internal software development would grind to a halt - or FOSS developers would be able to charge decent value for their work - or some ecosystem of foss-aggregators would spring up providing licensed, limited installs and support and legal protection.

Personally I am in favour of the last option - for each product a series of (local) companies could club together and provide support for each other's code bases, (if you use my react-foobar I will license company X to indemnify you - sort of approved vendors schemes)

I struggle to see many better ways

Edit:

Andressen was slightly wrong - FOSS is going to eat the world. And as such it's production will be a public good - paid for out of taxpayer money and directed as such - either as a utility through regulation or as science through funding only the brightest.

And the big question remains - if we could see the whole stack easily, and if it all was priced at the minimum wage for every developer in the stack how much would it be?

Would anyone pay it? Or worse, would they realise they did not need all those in-house developers anymore as they are all running "libBusiness.py" and it all kind of fits together.

Or as is more likely - will we see lots of companies like redhat, that produce a "bank/airline/retailer in a box" - and the internal teams are focused on that 5% of USP?

I am not sure I understand that world - but I also do not think I currently could select correctly all the FOSS packages needed to build that stack that can just run a business.

Trust me it does not look like the openERP style stacks. at all.

I never understood why people thought that was a good idea. People like Open Source because they don't want to depend on a single vendor, and yet these companies want to be the only vendor of their Open Source solution. It doesn't make sense.

How much money has Microsoft made selling Windows vs Linus off Linux?

How much money does Apple make off iThings?

Why not? Because when your project gets so big that lots of people rely on it, it would be better for the world to remove the private property restrictions, allowing fixes and innovations to come from anywhere and be distributed as widely as possible.

The question should be asked the other way: why not make it open source?

You see, all the objections here come from a capitalist mindset, which is based on private ownership and competition. “I built it so I own it.” That is how we ended up with a feudal society online, where conservatives are complaining they’re being silenced, where bulk collection of everyone’s info is possible in one place, where rents are being extracted from the ecosystem.

The alternative is collaboration with no private ownership of the platform. (Note that this is NOT socialism.)

Linus Torvalds launched Linux, Tim Berners launched the Web, Vitalik launched Ethereum, but they don’t “own it”. And it is precisely because there is no private ownership of the whole platform, that they have led to an explosion of wealth and utility for the entire world.

“Business models are incompatible with open source”. Well, sure. Rentseeking behavior gets harder when the platform is permissionless. But what has led to more value for the world:

AOL or the Web?

Internet Explorer or Chromium?

Britannica or Wikipedia?

Windows or Linux, BSD (including MacOS and Android)

Alchemy or Science?

This is a mindset issue in our culture. In current society the vast majority of people are living paycheck to paycheck, so they would love to escape this precarious situation. They take jobs because they pay, not so much because they like the project. When they do get financially independent, they keep going and going, trying to make more money and become a capitalist. And we all support these few people who “escaped and made it” by ensuring that their intellectual private property rights are enforced and their business models are enabled in our society (RIAA, MPAA, etc). In a society where everyone has UBI, people would work 20% of their time on stuff they like - science, open source, religion, hobbies, raising children etc. And projects would attract people because they are awesome and useful to many people, and because they can contribute something that others need.

Each small contribution to the gift economy costs very little, and there is no limit on the remixing and reusing of effective solutions. Private property is all about adding more friction to this permissionless model and excluding the rest of the world from using a resource and building on others’ discoveries. When Isaac Newton said “if I saw further, it’s because I stood on the shoulders of giants” he didn’t rent those shoulders. He wasn’t sued an a SWAT team didn’t break down his door. Isaac Newton wasn’t in pharma.

If I sound like some kind of communist, liste to the venture CAPITALISTS who fund the future and see where things are doing. For example read https://worldaftercapital.org by venture capitalist Albert Wenger general partner of Union Square Ventures to understand where we are headed as a society. And read their latest 3.0 thesis.