| Redhat, Element, Prusa, Adafruit, Sidero Labs, Arduino... plenty of companies that open source everything or almost everything and have have staying power. Many consumers, myself included, will -only- pay for technology if it is open source. In fact if something is proprietary I feel I am being cheated anyway and I might as well pirate it until I find something open to support. Many of us are willing to pay for time and labor and to support development for our personal projects and businesses so long as we have the power to change that relationship later and keep the tech if third party company later goes evil or goes under. If I do not have the source code, I do not own it. If I cannot own it, then why pay for it. Also everything becomes open source eventually. Companies can choose to accelerate this and earn community goodwill that might make them money selling open source turn-key services, or be replaced by that same community eventually doing it all themselves. No one pays for a license fee for the Linux kernel, but they pay their choice of cloud provider to host it. Choice. That is what I will pay for. https://staltz.com/time-till-open-source-alternative.html https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne... |
This is not a model that can work with regulated medical products. There is a very significant cost to maintaining static artifacts and I don’t see how you can defensively do that if anyone can access the artifacts?