I am so tired of this bullshit old flogging horse. Here we go again. There are lots of profitable companies built on or around open source. WordPress and its e

I am so tired of this bullshit old flogging horse. Here we go again. There are lots of profitable companies built on or around open source. WordPress and its entire ecosystem come to mind, especially including all the rest of the open source projects Automattic ($3Bn valuation) touches. Similar for Drupal, especially the founder's own Drupal service company, Acquia (sold at $1Bn valuation). There's no shortage of smaller companies like Sensio Labs, maintainer of the Symfony PHP framework, at 100 people and $1.9M. Or Plex, or a dozen other ~100 person companies. We may even have too many consulting companies who contribute patches, testing, and extension into OSS ecosystems. Should we bring up the biggest companies in the world, who maintain projects equally large in importance like Kubernetes, Typescript, Chromium, React, Golang, et al? What about the "pure" open source companies like RedHat or Canonical? There are lots of ways to make money on, in, and around Open Source software. It's sure hard to make a unicorn valuation, but that's not the definition of a "viable business model." Every 10 person "mom and pop" web consulting agency that pays their employees has a viable business model. Microsoft and Facebook have a extremely viable business models. The fastest growing service on Azure is their Kubernetes implementation, which is open source down to the hypervisor (and yes, you can run AKS on your own hardware and KVM if you like). So don't give me your sour grapes about there being no "viable" business models in open source. Maybe there are no viable UNICORN business models. Maybe there are no viable get rich quick models. Maybe there are no viable business models if you start from a development methodology rather than a customer need. Maybe Open Source is a liability for certain kinds of business models. We can discuss that. But "viable business models" are practically a dime a dozen in and around open source.