Successful pure play open source businesses are rare. As in RedHat; most others I can think of were successful in the sense they had good exits. On the other h

Successful pure play open source businesses are rare. As in RedHat; most others I can think of were successful in the sense they had good exits. On the other hand if you look at companies that build value-adds on top of open source, then the number is huge. It starts Facebook and includes a wide number of enterprise software companies like VMware, companies like Cloudflare, etc. They owe a lot of their success to open source and are major contributors in the aggregate. It's therefore really limiting to assume that open source necessarily has to be maintained by for profit, enterprise software companies. Most successful companies build SaaS or other value adds over their open source projects that actually solve business problems. The reason: that's what enterprise customers want to buy. I've run two companies in the database space that take this approach. We're not very worried about competition from Amazon.