> Totally open source works fine, it's when you try to mix open source with a controlling entity and a business model.
Trite as it may sound, open source isn't a business model. For a profitable business, you need something unique, a moat that competitors can't cross easily. Open source can certainly be part of that model, for example by increasing the value of your core assets. Or as Joel Spolsky wrote many years ago, commodify your complement.
Google, say, releases a lot of OSS. Guess what they're not releasing? The data they have hoovered up of practically every internet user, that they sell to their customers (companies that buy advertising, not the users). "Data is the new gold". They release tensorflow under a permissive license, not the data they're training and running their DL models on. They release Android for free, as that lowers the cost of phones and drives more users into the Google online empire, giving them ever more data. Again, "data is the new gold", "commodify your complement".
(Not picking on google here to say that they are good or evil, just an example of how you can build a spectacularly good business while also releasing a lot of OSS)
Or for all those VC-funded corps popping up trying to build OSS databases and seeing it doesn't work out (Mongo, Elastic, etc.), build a database, not a database engine. Data is the new gold, software, particularly OSS, is a commodity.
Trite as it may sound, open source isn't a business model. For a profitable business, you need something unique, a moat that competitors can't cross easily. Open source can certainly be part of that model, for example by increasing the value of your core assets. Or as Joel Spolsky wrote many years ago, commodify your complement.
Google, say, releases a lot of OSS. Guess what they're not releasing? The data they have hoovered up of practically every internet user, that they sell to their customers (companies that buy advertising, not the users). "Data is the new gold". They release tensorflow under a permissive license, not the data they're training and running their DL models on. They release Android for free, as that lowers the cost of phones and drives more users into the Google online empire, giving them ever more data. Again, "data is the new gold", "commodify your complement".
(Not picking on google here to say that they are good or evil, just an example of how you can build a spectacularly good business while also releasing a lot of OSS)
Or for all those VC-funded corps popping up trying to build OSS databases and seeing it doesn't work out (Mongo, Elastic, etc.), build a database, not a database engine. Data is the new gold, software, particularly OSS, is a commodity.