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I don't blame Sentry. FOSS is a fine ideal for hobby and academic projects, but it doesn't pay the bills. 36 years on and the most successful business model for

by bbanyc 7y ago

I don't blame Sentry. FOSS is a fine ideal for hobby and academic projects, but it doesn't pay the bills. 36 years on and the most successful business model for FOSS is to convince someone rich to lose money on it. (Cf. Gilmore at Cygnus, Shuttleworth at Canonical.) I do wish more companies would use these kinds of "Doom clauses" and contribute old software to the commons once it's no longer commercially viable.

tedivm 7y ago
That's the only business model as long as you ignore Automattic, Chef, CloudBees, Cloudera, Confluent, Databricks, DataStax, Gradle, Hashicorp, nginx, Puppet, RedHat, and many others.
- pnako 7y ago
  Some of those companies make money by selling proprietary software. They are thus proprietary software companies, and bad examples of open source software business models.
  - moritzplassnig 7y ago
    What are good examples?
    - pnako 7y ago
      Red Hat. They work with the community upstream, and they open source all their stuff.