| If by "open source business model" you mean a model that entails getting paid for production of open source software, directly, there are several. Paid open source development happens all the time. If you pay me, I will release open source to do such-and-such. Despite decades of continuous doomsaying, new dual licensing companies pop up all the time. If you use my open source to build closed, pay me for an exception to my copyleft license's terms. Those are just the simplest and best known. There are others, as well as all manner of hybrids, explored and unexplored. My latest work theorizing approaches---modelling business models, so to speak---is here: https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/10/17/mapping-models.html My outline of "purebred" models begins here: https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/10/17/mapping-models.html#... > Amazon and Google are not going to use your software, particularly your management software, “out of the box”, proprietary or no. They’re going to build their own management UX and UI, because they have their own particular requirements to serve their needs, and they’re going to build them using existing platform APIs. Licenses like MongoDB's SSPL leverage exactly this fact to address their business concerns. Mongo knows the big cloud providers are going to do their own custom service rigging, and that they'll keep it closed and proprietary. SSPL gives permission to use Mongo to offer Mongo as a service, but requires open release of the service rigging. I don't think companies writing and adopting these new licenses want to sell cloud providers proprietary licenses through their sales funnels. I think they'd rather stop cloud providers from offering their databases as services, full stop, or cut special deals with the cloud providers to resell their cores (Mongo) or popular add-ons (Redis, Elastic, ...). > You’re not going to resolve your own business mistakes by reverse-engineering a licensing solution to what was essentially a business model problem. Business model and license do not inhabit separate domains. They always intertwine. |