From my perspective, which admittedly is subjective and might be missing glaring examples to the opposite, open source has increasingly become a free marketing

From my perspective, which admittedly is subjective and might be missing glaring examples to the opposite, open source has increasingly become a free marketing gimmick for startups looking to be bought out. I feel like this would explain why so many open source projects these day seem surprised when confronted with the expectations of being an open source project. All things being equal, a piece of software will become more popular if it's open source. If it's open source and worse than the proprietary alternative, it will still pick up steam, while a proprietary competitor would be largely ignored. In fact, I would claim that a proprietary competitor will even be ignored if it's just as good, and even if it's a bit better: because there is a cost of adoption of new technologies, being a bit better isn't enough. An example of something that wasn't open source but succeeded anyway is Splunk. As far as I know, they have never leveraged open source, but their selling point was so unique that they didn't need to. However, most ideas aren't that game changing. Most projects don't have the luxury of an idea that has an elevator pitch so attractive it will attract both investors and customers right away. By 2007, Splunk had raised US$ 40M. The initial release of Elasticsearch was in 2010. How would ES have been received if they went to market with a proprietary product? I think the reason why it was open sourced from the start is quite obvious: noone would have cared otherwise, or they would have been overshadowed by an open source alternative. There was a demand for new, flashy, modern log monitoring among those that didn't want to buy Splunk, so it didn't have to be as good. What seems to happen more frequently though is that cloud services pick up these open source alternatives, make money off them, and/or buy up the company holding the IP. They move in and "embrace, extend and extinguish", killing two birds with one stone: on the one hand they damage the primary free alternative, while at the same time improving it while owning the full rights to the improvements. I don't have an answer to what to "do" about this but it seems like an increasing trend ever since the cloud industry started swallowing up most of what IT is about. In a way I suppose it's unavoidable, and maybe we need to see the beauty in the inherent resilience of open source: even when it's bought off and killed, they can never kill the previously freely licensed code. The "idea" if you will can live on, and must live on if we're going to avoid a complete dystopia in the long run. So turn the frustration of your favorite project being killed off into action: realize that no code comes for free, behind every open source success is usually an unsung and unpaid hero, and if you can't pick up the torch yourself, at least throw a few bucks to those who do. What else is there?