Correct, Open Source wins by establishing the value of community collaboration. If you use something mission critical, like monitoring, container orchestration, billing, case management etc and you’ve spent time training and learning the system then it follows that you want that system to get continuous updates and improvements, you want that system to succeed and have longevity. For closed source this is gauged by how their financials look and how many customers they have. But in the end its a risk, a guess, because if they go tits up then you SOL and need to change the system right quick due to a multitude of factors, not least security. For Open Source it’s different. You can much more directly contribute, both by paying optional fees and by supplying developers. And in the case the company fails then the code is still there and you can simply fork it and maintain it yourself. If the community is large you can even still collaborate and what was lost was the central steering and support which of course bring value but aren’t critical to a mature system.

The Open Source model makes a lot of sense even in our capitalistic world, so much so that I firmly believe it will kill all other business models in the software sphere in the coming 50 years (stuff like this is a very slow process). Multiple government agencies here in Sweden now have stated open source policies in place because for them procuring an open source system is just the correct risk management approach. And I working with large enterprises see it creeping in slowly, and the younger people at our customers start to get it, it’s starting to “click”.