| > Why does starting with the stronger revenue model mean you need to start with getting a large bunch of money rather than bootstrapping? Because enterprise sales are hard. Open source can get in through the back door, but closed source has to beat a path through the front door and that costs money, lots of it. > Why would anyone want to participate in a system whose goals prioritize strangers getting gratis database software over our families being able to eat? It's not about your families being able to eat or not. You can find plenty of middle ground, or you can decide to contribute to open source just to scratch your itch or fix your bug. That's why it works well for some kinds of software but not for all kinds of software. It works well for: - best of breed infrastructure projects (runners up have the same issues they have in commerce) - libraries - frameworks It does not work well for things where bespoke software is the norm or where the customer wants to have their own IP. For those situations traditional closed source software works better. That's why you're going to have a hard time finding a quality CAD/CAM system using open source that is tightly integrated and polished. There are middle grounds: Blender famously used the ransom model to become open source, entire empires have been built on service companies around open source and some people made pretty good money selling their open source projects to the highest bidder (glusterfs, mysql and a whole raft of others). So nobody is forcing you to give your work to others so your families can't eat, it's a free choice. I decided very specifically not to contribute to open source because I wanted my family to eat, though I do file the occasional bug report/patch (and the way in which those are treated is not very encouraging to do more of it). But at the same time I'm grateful for everybody that did contribute to open source, they enabled the web as we know it to a very large extent and to discard or devalue that is a huge mistake. |