[jchw]

Who said anyone was doing anything for exposure, either? I think open source is doomed if people fail to understand that when you release open source code under open source licenses, your users don’t owe you anything, and in return, you don’t owe your users anything either. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t even really care that much about whether or not people adhere to the licenses I use for the most part.

Nobody is owed a sustainable ecosystem to profit off of open source. When things align to be mutually beneficial, that’s great. But by the nature of it, if you want to make money off of software, you should not release it as open source. It’s probably going to eventually wind up being a conflict of interest, wherein the “open” parts of a project eventually become less and less relevant in favor of closed parts.

Open source doesn’t and shouldn’t guarantee a sustainable business model. The best you can hope for is that parties collaborate because they can benefit mutually from this collaboration, like with the Linux kernel.

[lumost]

An important distinction of Linux kernel development from most open source contributions is that the companies contributing code typically make their money off of selling hardware which must run or work with linux to be successful. These companies are all financially incentivized to keep the Linux collaboration successful.

[indymike]

Almost every open source package has a model where multiple contributors make money off something else. Usually that something else is software or hardware that is built with the open source package.

[andi999]

That sounds a bit like Thatcher 'there is no society' - society, I am not sure if open software can survive without permanence, trust and reliability (from the developer and customer side, not the code basis).