| I live on both sides of this divide, so maybe I can offer my 2 cents: * Created & maintain Gensim and other open source, used by thousands of companies for free. * Created & sell an (unrelated) B2B product. Yes, I've had B2B prospects who thought they could "stitch my product together using open source". These people are invariably either low budget & high-maintenance, or unsophisticated = don't realize how much work the "just stitching" part is. Plus how little the stitched-together-from-open-source part actually is of the whole. Good riddance of the former – go ahead and use open source, god speed. Your time is free, mine is not. The latter often come back after being burned & learning the ropes. Maybe it helps to think of it this way: savvy companies are much more risk-averse than your typical open source hacker. They price in risk into their decision making. So your assertion of "almost free" is the root of the issue: a business sees the lack of business scaffolding (stability, continuity, legal, management…) and thinks "Expensive! We'll have to do this ourselves! Headache! Liability! Extra cost!". Sure, "free code" helps, everybody likes free, but the code is not the only consideration. |
- look into state-of-the-art related to our problem - think very hard about how to apply the academic state-of-the-art to our problem - stitch a fully fletched software solution together
The problem obviously emerged reliably in the last step, which was supposed to take negligible time and should be done by more junior team members (because they were not smart enough for step 2).
The result was a bunch of prototypes running in production, and huge costs for keeping the whole thing somehow running.