> The whole Open Source community? Volunteer driven, donation funded projects? Non-Profit charities, mostly composed out of volunteers?
None of those are businesses. Maybe I should have clarified but I meant a business as one where employees work for an organization that derives value from their work (say $A), the organization pays the employees some form of compensation ($B), and the expectation is that the value derived by each employee is more than the compensation (i.e $A > $B).
In that model I don't see many places where ($A - $B) < $7.
Slack offers its standard plan for free if you are a non-profit org. But you need to be an org; you can’t just walk in and claim your free plan if all you have is a GitHub repo and a (even large) community.
But when a lot of tools and integrations only work with Slack, then open source projects often don’t have the time to reimplement them just for their own projects.
The network effect leads to lots of open source projects having to choose slack – which, in turn, means they end up having to pay, without having revenue.
None of those are businesses. Maybe I should have clarified but I meant a business as one where employees work for an organization that derives value from their work (say $A), the organization pays the employees some form of compensation ($B), and the expectation is that the value derived by each employee is more than the compensation (i.e $A > $B).
In that model I don't see many places where ($A - $B) < $7.