Excellent article. Some choice quotes: """ While open source was proven to be incredibly profitable and profoundly useful for the software industry as a whole,

Excellent article. Some choice quotes: """ While open source was proven to be incredibly profitable and profoundly useful for the software industry as a whole, the economics of making open source work for one business are much different. """ """ This logic [of "post-open"/"fair source"/"source available"] is rooted in a deeper notion of ownership ... The notion is that the software they build belongs to them. They possess a sense of ownership over the software, which comes with a set of moral and perhaps legal rights to the software, which, importantly, are withheld from any entity other than themselves. The “developers” enjoy this special relationship with the project ... and third-party entities who work on the source code are merely “contributors” ... """ """ My well-wishes are contingent on any movements which aim to compete with open source stopping short of calling themselves open source. """ To me, this article is pointing out the intrinsic "cursed" problem of providing a startup mentality to an open source product. FOSS relies on giving freedom to replicate while (naive) startups are almost by definition looking for moats or monopolies to become unicorns. There are ways of providing FOSS products, say as a by-product or ancillary project, but if a startup's main product is the source, it's almost antithetical to the business proposition. I think this point is only ever obliquely addressed and this article tackles it head on. I also appreciate the articles focus on "open washing", where the new breed of "post-open" or "fair source" movements either engage in or stop just shy of trying to redefine the term "open source" to mean "source available" and not one that respects freedom.