The Open Source Business Model is Under Siege

Good essay from Paul Dix at InfluxData about the challenges open source businesses face. Though I’d quibble with the “under siege” framing, as if these are new problems—they’re not.

Matt Cutts on the scarcity of open source services:

Open source is really good at creating products. Almost any commercial software package or product like Word, Excel, Windows, or Photoshop has a great open source equivalent. However, open source has been less successful at creating services. Where’s the open source version of Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Gmail, or Craigslist?

I (unsurprisingly) think the answer looks a lot like WordPress and Automattic, with a combination of distributed and centralized systems complementing each other.