[graemep]

There are lots of successful open source companies. How much did IBM buy Red Hat for? How profitable was it? There are businesses making money out of every major open source project and contributing to it.

The business model fails for reasons other than it just being open source:

1. trying to sell open source as a product rather than as a way to sell something else - services, hardware, whatever. 2. being the main developer - and therefore losing the benefit of sharing development costs. How is it a bazaar if there is only one organization developing it?

[the_mitsuhiko]

Red Hat is also highly criticized for their present day questionable reinterpretation of what the GPL allows them to do.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "...Red Hat..."

Successful tech companies don't sell themselves, particularly to has-beens like IBM.

[growse]

IBM pulled in $60b last year.

For many tech companies (and especially their investors), selling out and realising a return is the very definition of success.