[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> There are hundreds of open source companies - many making gobs of money.

[citation needed]

It seems there may be many open source companies with tons of users, but they seem to struggle with monetization and turning those users into paying users.

Redhat which used to be the epitome of a company making money from open source got acquired by IBM.

A lot of other open source companies are switching to non-open source licenses.

[javamonn]

OSS Capital, which participated in the Rome Tools, Inc round, has compiled a list which includes commercial open source companies, revenue estimates, and how much VC raised: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17nKMpi_Dh5slCqzLSFBo...

[Aken]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/glennsolomon/2020/09/15/monetiz...

[gjhr]

34 billion dollars doesn't count as gobs of money?

[ttul]

Even though a company's software might be open source, the company does own the intellectual property of the open source project. It chooses what license under which the software should be offered and has the freedom to commercially exploit the software in ways that nobody else can.

That being said, a compiler toolchain is not so easily monetized as something like Grafana, which has obvious enterprise features that need filling in and which can be hosted as a cloud service, generating revenue that way.

I imagine the team has ideas for monetization, otherwise they would not have raised $4.5M from some top shelf venture capitalists. I would like to know what those ideas are.