This article uses the wrong framework to think about successful open source projects. It's not like the mobile app store ecosystem. Successful projects, in ter

This article uses the wrong framework to think about successful open source projects. It's not like the mobile app store ecosystem. Successful projects, in terms of numbers of users and contributors, seem to happen in places where many people need something complex and pool their resources to all share in a better solution than any individual one could have been. Putting the whole thing under economic norms, and encouraging communities to think in those terms is probably extraordinarily counter productive. There isn't enough money available to pay open source developers what they are worth in dollars. If open source operated under economic norms it wouldn't work, since it operates under social norms it does [1]. There is a reason that everyone here doesn't get paid to work on whatever cool fun they feel like working on. A "type 0" project is a hobby project and your github account isn't there to get you paid. Open sourcing it is socially acceptable public charitable giving crossed with academic publishing. The next step isn't consulting monetization models or aquisition/IPO. The next step is more contributors so that a team of motivated people can solve a complex problem, for everyone, once and for all (that's the ideal version anyway, about as likely as an IPO or aquisition). That might bring some money, maybe for some core peole but more important is that now everyone else, and especially those that contributed and have expertise, can go on and build/do that thing that this complex problem was stopping them from doing. Looking at this as an progression from github project to aquisition and defining the stage of a project by revenue misses nearly every lesson learned from watching this strange new market succeed so spectacularly entirely because it is based on different norms and therefore attacks different problems. [1] http://youtu.be/OdjlOgGVRVA http://youtu.be/OdjlOgGVRVA