The answer to that question is two-fold. 1.) Many of the companies that make the most on open source are not software vendors per se but still significant cont

The answer to that question is two-fold. 1.) Many of the companies that make the most on open source are not software vendors per se but still significant contributors in their own right. Example: Google, Facebook. Kubernetes exists because of Google. Facebook has a ridiculously long list of significant projects. [1] It's really important not to ignore this because you are otherwise missing the core economics of the open source movement. 2. There are lots of companies making good money operating open source in the cloud. Data Bricks, Confluent, MongoDB, and Amazon (specifically Aurora) are good examples. I'm not saying the companies are necessarily all profitable, only that their COGS look good and they will be profitable in due time. The key is you need to have software that is worth paying other people to operate. Data management is common to many of the main contenders. Mozilla's problem is they aren't #1 and don't offer software that would allow them to become #2. [1] https://opensource.facebook.com/projects https://opensource.facebook.com/projects