[smeyer]

I think your view is too strongly assuming that everyone in the market is perfectly rational and perfectly replaceable with zero transaction costs..

Especially when you start talking about a single person company, it could be as simple as the founder being sentimentally attached to the company and continuing it despite making less than they could with other opportunities, but that doesn't mean that if the founder gets hit by a bus someone else will also be willing to take a sub-optimal gig. Or a company might currently be barely worth running with $20k a month in revenue, but if there is a period of turmoil and lost customers in the process of open-sourcing/founder getting hit by a bus/whatever that now the customer base would only bring in $10k a month, it's no longer profitable, and the market fails to find someone to run the company.

[schnable]

If the code is open sourced, there doesn't need to be a dedicated company behind supporting it. Assuming a compatible license, any party that wants to use can fork it and pay people to maintain it for their own needs without advertising that they "support" the code.

[SoftTalker]

But just because something is open source doesn't mean it's easily maintainable by anyone. It's one thing to install and run it somewhere, but if it needs fixes or customization it quickly becomes necessary to learn and understand the architecture and organization of the code, the data models and structures, etc. and if it was previously the product of a "one man shop" then you're going to have to pay someone to do that learning.