At the widest level 'has open sourcing ever killed a company'. Off-hand I can't think of any companies that have taken a successful proprietary product (code-b

At the widest level 'has open sourcing ever killed a company'. Off-hand I can't think of any companies that have taken a successful proprietary product (code-base) and then open sourced it. If your main code-base and business around it are successful there's not much value to open sourcing it. It would be hard to convince any business that they should do something that increases risk. The "business" argument in favour of open source would be around contributors and the marketing effect - but if the product is already successful that's a weak argument. In most circumstances software companies have open sourced proprietary code-bases because they were under threat and needed some sort of radical strategy. The canonical example is Netscape. There's really on a few examples - I don't think there's much evidence that they failed _because of_ open sourcing. The reality is they were under competitive pressure any way. Another big example is Sun though that's a nuanced story far beyond open source. Then the last group is companies that are built as open source endeavours. Do they fail 'because' of open source more than proprietary software companies? It's a bit of a difficult to infer what would have happened if they weren't open source: how do you imagine Docker would be doing without being open source, VMWare is an example from an earlier age but the user audience and market dynamic are a bit different. My personal opinion would be that open source helps in the initial stages if your target user is technical [0], but that it does make it harder to commercialise and puts you under consistent risk of substitution or disintermediation. Community building isn't really dependant on being open source - look at GitHub, it serves the developer community who are pragmatists. The problem of commercialisation is that the economics aren't on your side and the customers buying behaviour is orientated on the proprietary model - users buy scarcity. If you're interested there's quite a lot of good academic work on open source as a business model, searching for 'innovation and open source' should turn up some interesting papers. Like all business studies they all suffer from a small group of examples and a complex environment aka real life. [0] In other words, if it's a normal user audience open source makes no difference. That's why line of business apps don't have any traction.