Although the idea of investing because of indirect benefits is interesting, I think the investment thesis is much simpler: You can build profitable business aro

Although the idea of investing because of indirect benefits is interesting, I think the investment thesis is much simpler: You can build profitable business around open source, even if you make money by selling consulting. Redhat has $10B market cap, MySQL was sold for $1B back in the days. nginx inc. received a substantial investment. Can you build profitable business around package manager? Sure, there is a big community of developers that are using npm on daily basis for mission critical work. It's really hard to build that kind of community of professionals in any field. I don't see why you couldn't build business around that.