[dmezzetti]

My perspective as an open source developer of txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai).

When you get started in open source, it's a great way for a small team to get the word out. Conversely, when starting as proprietary software or SaaS, you're looking at advertising, websites, sales calls and so forth. If an open source company is lucky enough to be successful, the next phase is having users and perhaps even funding. When the team grows and/or others put their own money or career into the company, they want an outcome. It becomes hard to ignore that there are thousands of people using the software and inevitably it becomes an exercise on how to claw back from the group of "free" users. There is also the fear that a big company will undercut the open source company by offering the software as part of a cloud service. This is my opinion on how we got here with confusing licensing changes.

Most don't have the means to accept little to no income from their work. But there shouldn't be a "fixed pot" mentality. In order to be a successful open source company, one has to see the "free" users as beneficial. Think of it as a big wide open world and that while some will never pay, if you add value in other ways on top of your open source offerings, there will be significant income opportunities. Could be consulting projects, hosted/cloud/SaaS versions or specialized components.

One should also look at operations. There will be a new wave of companies, especially in the AI space, that are lean and using automation to build great things with a very limited amount of resources. Perhaps they don't even need funding and can build a profitable company without it. In those cases, they won't have those internal pressures and hence likely to be more competitive. Something to watch in 2024.