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Cygnus was founded in 1989 and had success. Red Hat started in 1993 and was successful. MySQL was released in 1994-1995 and was successful. JBoss started in 1

by Ologn 2y ago

Cygnus was founded in 1989 and had success. Red Hat started in 1993 and was successful. MySQL was released in 1994-1995 and was successful. JBoss started in 1999 and was successful. A lot of these companies ultimately were swallowed up by IBM, except for MySQL which was ultimately swallowed up by Oracle. They were successes and lessons can be drawn from them. Google releases the Android Open Source Project, the basis of things like LineageOS. Facebook releases React under the MIT license. These are not open source companies, but they release major software under FLOSS licenses.

bruce511 2y ago
There are a small number of OSS companies you can point to as being successful. Mozilla is successful, but basically their revenue comes from Google. So certainly one lesson there is to find a single giant benefactor. Google, Facebook etc do have open source code, but not their "revenue earning" product. So perhaps the lesson there is to make lots of money somehow else and use that to fund your OSS projects. MySql was kinda Open Source, but their license violated OSS principles. So the lesson there might be "call it Open Source, but lie". Red Hat took a project made by someone else, avoided the development costs, and monetized packaging and support. (The then pushed some of that revenue back at the upstream projects.) So I guess the lesson there is to minimize development costs and maximise marketing. None of which negates your point that some small number of companies have found success. But I'm not sure this helps random developer monetize their OSS project today.