[jerrac]

The article itself is rather, hmm... Melodramatic? Not sure that's the right word, but it is close. That said, the overall idea that "open source" projects that are controlled by a single vendor have problems is true.

I think that having a for-profit company controlling an open source project is a major conflict of interest. Open source does not always result in profit. Often the opposite. And I think we've seen the results of that with all the different open source projects that have re-licensed into pretend open source licenses.

There are ways to run open source projects that support both the open source culture, and allow for for-profit companies to make a profit. But most of those ways mean allowing competition. Which is where the single vendor project conflict of interest becomes apparent. Yeah, big tech will leech off any successful project. Yes, that means less money for the "single vendor". Yes, that is not fair. But I'd say re-licensing is worse than leeching, so...

The other side effect of "single vendor" I've run into a lot, is simply that their paid options are always priced for organizations with very deep pockets. So the smaller orgs (and individual developers) that jumped on the bandwagon early because the project was open source (and they actually could jump on the bandwagon), have no chance at supporting the project. And end up have to find something else because the project stops supporting open source.

[jshen]

I don't see how it's a conflict of interest. The primary benefit of open source is that you can run and modify it yourself if you need to. This benefit is still there if there is a single vendor behind the project.

The risk of a single vendor project is that it's less likely to be supported in the long run. This isn't a conflict of interest though.