This is the best write up I have seen in a long time on this subject. Open source doesn’t exist in a vacuum without commercial influence. The best you can do is

This is the best write up I have seen in a long time on this subject. Open source doesn’t exist in a vacuum without commercial influence. The best you can do is pick the influence. FAANG sponsor open source either for strategic reasons (the Kubernetes example in the blog) or as a goodwill exercise. To the kinds of engineers Facebook would love to hire to help serve ads more devilishly, React goes a long way to making the company look developer friendly. These projects get a ton of marketing support (time to promote the project, brand name, etc) that an all-volunteer nights and weekends grassroots open source project can never complete with. Then there’s open core, which seems to struggle from the difficulty that open source has a kind of altruistic halo around it, and any attempt to commercialise or restrict parts of it (especially for things that were once open) is seen as bait and switch. Yet to see an Open Core company that isn’t continuiously torn between what it takes to keep the business viable and what it takes to keep the community on their side. Consulting and support has its own downsides too. It only scales linearly as you can hire people, and the margins are much lower so it takes a lot more people - much less fun of a company to run. And it influences the project roadmap too: “yes the setup process is broken and could do with a wizard, but the complex install process drives a lot of our consulting leads”. It seems like the huge companies that were threatened by open source have been replaced by huge companies that know how to weaponise open source. Open source still wears a certain halo thanks the nights and weekends code hacker that does it for the love, but open source at any scale is as corrupt - maybe more corrupt - than any proprietary company. (Disclaimer: my company sells proprietary software but gives customers source access/right to modify and open sources many of the building blocks. As someone who wrote code for the love of it, I often feel like there’s something evil in not making everything open source. But I’m yet to see a less evil open source model)