After two decades in the proprietary software business, I chose a FOSS model for our current product. To succeed at scale with this model, you have to give up t

After two decades in the proprietary software business, I chose a FOSS model for our current product. To succeed at scale with this model, you have to give up the idea of selling units and hope that people start using your free units as much as possible. This is pretty much the reverse of traditional product sales. The most successful FOSS-based companies over the long haul figure out how to create an *ecosystem* around the use cases for the FOSS. The more users and the more use cases, the more people in the ecosystem. The more people in the ecosystem, the more potential customers there are for the company's paid products and services, like consulting, setup, customization, documentation, and training. This is exactly the model Red Hat uses and they are the largest and most successful FOSS company in the world. In many ways, Apple is also a FOSS-based company in that everything they sell in MacOS had its origins in the free, open source BSD Unix distribution. Google, too, makes a fortune from FOSS since Android is also built on old Unix code and ideas. Nothing prevents anyone from taking those free original materials and making their own enterprise, ecosystem, or economy out of them -- and that's the true power of FOSS. "Giving back code" is overrated and often useless. Google doesn't want your code. The way that FOSS gives back is by enabling other commercial entities to make money quickly and without worrying about licensing or paying anyone for code bits they use in other products. This is a *huge* and important contribution to society. At its core, FOSS is not about a community; it's about enabling commercialization and paid products! Free, community users are just riding on the back of that elephant. Unless you reach elephant size, FOSS projects will likely never earn enough money to sustain a business.