Comment by PittleyDunkin
14 days ago
> This isn't remotely shocking, just look at Redis, Elastic and many many others... Open Source works until it doesn't.
I would argue that redis and elastic are signs that open source does work, albeit not well as a for-profit business. Open source hardware has a completely different set of problems.
If it doesn't work well for such high profile names, why would we expect it to work at all for an unheard of nobody? Doesn't that mean that kpen source doesn't actually work?
> If it doesn't work well for such high profile names
What, exactly, doesn't work well? Almost anybody knows of Redis and ElasticSearch, many of the ideas they implement spread in the ecosystem and everyone can still use the old versions as the FOSS they were made as.
If you're talking about that they were unable to build a for-profit on top of giving software away for free without any concrete plans on how to actually make money, yeah, that might not have been sustainable. But that makes it sound like their business plans were what didn't work, the Open Source part seems to have worked out just fine for what the purpose is, to give away software for free.
I think it depends a lot of what one see as a success and "make it work". If we think that success is only high earning, growing forever, vc fuelled companies, then no. Open source will never work for that.