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> "if it's involved in infrastructure, open source it, if it's related to movies, keep it closed." In the first wave(s) of open source, I think most contributo
by jrochkind1 6y ago
> "if it's involved in infrastructure, open source it, if it's related to movies, keep it closed."
In the first wave(s) of open source, I think most contributors were working on company time, but the open source was not the primary product of the company. It was something useful to the business of the company, without being the business of the company.
So what you describe seems to fit into that model.
That model seems to be less and less of open source contribution though. (I am not certain why). And I think that has a lot to do with current apparent crises in open source sustainability -- it was the model that worked, for a while, to produce and maintain lots of open source. I am not sure "open source companies" ever really have.
- jabl 6y agoI don't think that model has gone away. That's largely the basis for how all those large companies (FAANG's included) contribute to open source, and some smaller companies as well. The model is IMHO fairly well explained by "sharing the maintenance burden of commodified infrastructure" in some cases, and in other cases by "commodify your complement". Open sourcing the core value proposition of your company? Yeah, that's where all those OSS startups are struggling, and then get a lot of flak for shifting to proprietary licensing (e.g. Mongo, Elastic).