I'd say - open source works because there is a large amount of work that's done by people other than the main authors, or people outside the project. e.g. See

I'd say - open source works because there is a large amount of work that's done by people other than the main authors, or people outside the project. e.g. See all the documentation that's done around Linux or git. If you try to sell a small piece of software, I believe in most cases that the cost of developing will be dwarfed by the cost of support, documentation, and marketing. - Giving away almost everything is standard for both open source and for for-profit. That seems to be inherent in the structure of the economy at this point. If you don't give away a lot, you don't really compete. e.g. see the social media companies that wanted to charge for usage sqlite seems to have sustainably paid employees, but it gives away 99.9% of the work. Similarly, free tiers often give away 99% of the features of commercial products, with some artificial caps. - Likewise, going into debt seems to be standard practice. It's hard to be competitive against organizations taking on huge amounts of debt. You might not think it's the same at a small scale, but I do believe there are say lots of crypto companies hiring technical staff that "distort" the market of who can help you, e.g. compiler engineers - SaaS seems to work more at the application level. I always thought it would be nice to sell low level services like data feeds, but in practice that seems rare. (I guess Bloomberg terminal is kinda like selling data behind an expensive piece of hardware. Similar to Apple, if you have the resources to achieve this vertical integration, then you can have a "moat") --- It would be nice if there were other models for sure. But I don't think the problem is necessarily software, as much as "small". I think the economy is structured in a way so that the competitive actors tend to be groups of people aligned in some corporate structure (which does kinda suck). As in the beginning of the post, it says "your competition is highly paid teams are profitable companies". Even a big company like Hashicorp has problems competing against those companies, and apparently Redis. And also nytimes, Universal music, and every other media company. The economy is not a friendly place. Certainly there are one person businesses like tarsnap and pinboard and so forth, but I also think marketing and support is a big problem in those cases.