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This may sound heretical but the idea of open sourcing commercial offerings always seemed like bad business to me. We are seeing it come to roost now with cloud providers selling a more desirable version of an open source platform that the makers of the platform.

If you strip everything down to first principles, you get paid because you have a valuable asset. That asset may be your skill, your time, a piece of land, a patent, etc. With open source, you give away your key asset and then you have nothing except the wish and hope that nobody takes it and eats your lunch with your own fork. Which is clearly what is happening in this case.

I am all for things being done as open source because you believe in the freedom of it, or it's fun for you, but it seems like a really bad way of getting programmers and businesses paid, if you're into that sort of thing.




Yes, F/OSS works great for your core product's complements, and not necessarily for the core product itself.

https://www.gwern.net/Complement




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