A viewpoint that often gets left out of these discussions is the intersection of true open source and doing big things. So many orgs and people in these debate

A viewpoint that often gets left out of these discussions is the intersection of true open source and doing big things. So many orgs and people in these debates fall into the easy trap of assuming the world of potential open source users (and contributors) can be split into two camps: there are small-scale/small-business/hobby/startup projects running on true open source, and then there are Big Internet Things run by Big Money Machines that can afford to pay any price and should, and probably don't care about open principles in the first place and therefore don't mind running a closed-source version of some project. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) doesn't fit these molds: Wikipedia is kind of a Big Thing on the Internet, and yet the WMF is committed to openness and transparency, and part of that commitment is that we only use real open source software. This is increasingly a challenging proposition with the shift towards "Open Core" concepts and specialty not-so-open licensing. The "Open Core" model is especially challenging for the WMF, as it's usually structured along the lines of "The hobbyist version of this product is open source, but if you want the features that are necessary to operate at big global scale, you need to buy licenses and run proprietary extensions or versions." The WMF's principled way of operating relies on there being real open source projects that actually work for doing big things. I think the Internet (and the world) would be a better place if there were more principled organizations like the WMF which operate with a high degree of technical transparency and openness. If open source licensing models keep going down these darker paths, it's hard to imagine such organizations being very successful. It should not be a given that doing big things in the world implies going proprietary and commercial and running hidden code nobody else can see (or use to replicate your success at other open orgs!).