> perhaps software on such a large scale that "scratch your own itch" motivations have insurmountable ramp up difficulties
I don't think that's true, at least for software such as Elastic, Mongo and RedisLabs.
There are a lot of big companies that benefit from those, and might want to invest it, despite not being their direct revenue driver.
See for example the Cassandra database released by Facebook. Or how Amazon is going to invest in their Elastic fork now. Or how Linux is funded by dozens of companies (IBM, RedHat, Oracle...)
Or pretty much any programming language: I haven't seen a programming language that's not truly Open Source (as in the compiler/interpreter + API) for decades.
The kind of software where it's not going to work is where it's solving a business need for companies that are not software companies: but Open Source isn't common in those fields anyway.
I don't think that's true, at least for software such as Elastic, Mongo and RedisLabs.
There are a lot of big companies that benefit from those, and might want to invest it, despite not being their direct revenue driver.
See for example the Cassandra database released by Facebook. Or how Amazon is going to invest in their Elastic fork now. Or how Linux is funded by dozens of companies (IBM, RedHat, Oracle...)
Or pretty much any programming language: I haven't seen a programming language that's not truly Open Source (as in the compiler/interpreter + API) for decades.
The kind of software where it's not going to work is where it's solving a business need for companies that are not software companies: but Open Source isn't common in those fields anyway.