I would encourage people to read the article. VM Brasseur has a click-baity title, which is fine, but the point they are making is actually a bit more subtle. I

I would encourage people to read the article. VM Brasseur has a click-baity title, which is fine, but the point they are making is actually a bit more subtle. I'll quote from the article: > There is a great number of potential business models, but “open source” is not one of them. It is, instead, one of the many tools that can be employed in order to make a selected business model work as expected. > Therefore open source ... does not ... concern itself with business any more than food concerns itself with business. If there is a business that has a business model that is not living up to expectations, and if that business model uses open source as one if its tools, it’s illogical to blame open source for the failure. The gist of the article isn't "open source and business are incompatible", rather, it's saying "don't blame open source for a failure of your business". VM Brasseur focuses on open core specifically, a subset of an "open source business strategy", talking about what kind of expectations one should have engaging in that strategy, pointing to John Mark Walker's post on "How to Make Money from Open Source Platforms" [0]. As an aside, I would like to point out that there are successes in some businesses pursuing an "open source" strategy, for a broader form of open source, either using open source as a key feature or because the technology was open sourced, abandoned and picked up by someone else. Arduino [1] comes to mind, where they used the open sourced Arduino platform, the IDE, the libraries and the open source hardware schematic and boards, that was essentially abandoned by the original creators and picked up by Massimo Banzi and David Mellis. There were other factors to Arduino's success, such as focusing on artists and educators, there being a need for a cheap, accessible electronics/microcontroller platform, selling physical devices and various other economic factors that went into making the business viable, etc., so maybe I'm being overly pedantic and not really contradicting VM Brasseur's claim. In case people don't know, VM Brasseur is a big proponent of open source and has written a book called "Forge Your Future With Open Source" [2] and is in the process of writing a new book about "FOSS strategy in business" [3]. [0] https://www.linux.com/news/how-make-money-open-source-platforms/ https://www.linux.com/news/how-make-money-open-source-platfo... [1] https://arduinohistory.github.io/ https://arduinohistory.github.io/ [2] https://pragprog.com/titles/vbopens/forge-your-future-with-open-source/ https://pragprog.com/titles/vbopens/forge-your-future-with-o... [3] https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2021/03/19/coming-soon-a-new-book-about-foss-strategy-in-business https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2021/03/19/coming-soon-...