[kuschku]

Of course it could happen.

But we've had open source alternatives for many of these things for many years, and no company has gone to support any of them.

There's no company backing mastodon, and very little support for similar tools.

Of course it could happen. But it's not happening.

[TuringTest]

Right, but my point is that the reason for not happening is not a lack of monetization strategies, but one of critical mass.

If a free software collaboration platform gains traction in the enterprise, it could be pushed as a safe alternative in the next data scandal, and maybe enough people could switch to it to become a viable public resource like Linux and Apache have been since the turn of the century. It's a plausible scenario, even if it's not guaranteed to happen soon.