Problems With Open-Source Business Models
I strongly disagree with the hypothesis raised in the article.<p>First , most open source companies these days are Ventured Back ( Elastic , CockroachDB, MongoDB etc..) meaning the core of the issue isn&#x27;t &quot;AWS&quot; not paying license fees or people creating tech on top of Open Source , it&#x27;s VCs who want their money back times ten.<p>Companies like MongoDB&#x2F;Elastic have raised hundred of millions and yet are still not profitable.<p>Who&#x27;s fault is it ? Did the MongoDB community ever asked the company to go that way ? Did MongoDB presented a roadmap to the community saying that they would have to be &quot;profitable by Month X&quot; or they would change their licence to make more money ?<p>Nobody has forced those founders&#x2F;companies hands to make their products open source nor to raise that much capital.<p>If the industry is turning that way it is essentially because those businesses have used Open Source as a mean to reach the widest possible audience in order to increase growth and show great metrics to VCs and investors to raise absolutely obscene amount of cash.<p>Vue.js and Laravel are two very well maintain and extremely profitable open source project.<p>Those projects did not asked for 150M$ in fundraising and then realized : &quot;Ooops we won&#x27;t meet our 100% YoY Growth to satisfy VCs promises&quot;.<p>If some companies are switching their licensing , it&#x27;s mostly because they overestimated their technology value and can&#x27;t show to investors the numbers they promised.<p>This isn&#x27;t due the &quot;AWS Problem&quot; or because of a &quot;wrong business model&quot; with FOSS.