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Have your cake and eat it too: the evolution of commercial open source

kojo.blog · 927 words · saved by 1 readers

It's hard to imagine a world without open-source software. In the last few decades, open source has gone from fierce opposition from tech executives to being a mainstream category of software businesses. In this post, I dive into how commercial open source companies have had their cake (leveraged free software and community contributions) and eaten it too (built sustainable and viable businesses on top of free software). Have your cake ...: the value of community Successful commercial open-source strategies invest heavily in community. For creators and maintainers, opening up a project to community contributions means real-time feedback. You see this in the pull request and issues sections of any popular open-source repository. Maintainers know exactly what users think about the product and where they would like to see improvements. This real-time feedback is a low-cost way of discovering new user needs. Another way to think about the value of open-source projects is as lead generation

It's hard to imagine a world without open-source software. In the last few decades, open source has gone from fierce opposition from tech executives to being a mainstream category of software businesses. In this post, I dive into how commercial open source companies have had their cake (leveraged free software and community contributions) and eaten it too (built sustainable and viable businesses on top of free software). Have your cake ...: the value of community Successful commercial open-source strategies invest heavily in community. For creators and maintainers, opening up a project to comm

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