Profit is an accounting term, so ambiguous. To be actually clear, it would be useful to qualify it as "taxable profit" or "investor profit," for example. In pra

Profit is an accounting term, so ambiguous. To be actually clear, it would be useful to qualify it as "taxable profit" or "investor profit," for example. In practice, these are two unrelated numbers for most big companies. Each one is defined by who you are communicating to, and what the rules are for this communication. You might also have "management profit," a catch-all term for unstandard & unregulated metrics. For example, A business graduates from "cash accounting" for tax and investor purposes... but it's still useful for the old management to track the old definition of profit. Maybe because habits. Maybe because it tracks cash flow or is useful some other way. It's one of those pomo problems. The SEC, IRS or bank manager will not stand for "SEC Profit." They want "real" profit. It's like a naive local politician demanding to know what the hospital "really" cost the contractor. Anyway.... like the SEC, IRS and such... author is using terms from their own perspective. When they say "Open Source does not win by being cheaper," "open source" specifically refers to an open source business modeled after MongoDB or similar. So yes, investors, growth goals and such are implied. He clarifies himself on this point and there's no real point taking it into semantic growling.