Open source companies have never made sense to me as a viable business model. The idea is that people who aren’t being paid will contribute to a project, because they are interested, and then someone else will make money with that project. It seems very counter intuitive to me. I like the idea of people working on projects for free and offering them to the community for free, but that other people will take advantage of these projects for their own benefit sounds like exactly the situation napster was in a few years ago. Napster making money off of other people’s work. However, that appears to be the way the business is going. As companies “open up” to open source, providing programs to the community and what not, open source is beginning to enter a new stage. As I talked about last week, people will often contribute to open source projects just because they are interested. Personally however, I would feel weird if the open source projects were then used by someone else to make money. I think the current model will be good for software quality but not good for community experience. As more people profit from the technology, such as when Google sells their android operating system, I think less contributors are going to want to contribute. It goes back to the idea of the homebrew computer club. When Bill Gates said that people should be able to make money from their code, people were upset, but if it wasn’t their code they couldn’t really complain. Now, however, someone else could profit from your code and all you would receive is a shout out in a README. ESR talks about how peer review is better in open source than closed source, however, with the current model I don’t feel like peer review is being benefited from the most. Because a large portion of the market is working for profit there are always other considerations when working on open source projects today. But also, this collecting rent in the close source is not to be sniffed at. A lot of great programs have come from a closed source space. Undoubtedly Maya is a better animation platform than, though from the comment about peer review ESR would suggest otherwise. I feel the current marketplace is most confusing with regards to security and privacy. According to some of the main tenets of computer security a peer reviewed security system is much better than a non peer reviewed option, therefore theoretically open source would be better for security. However, open source, especially the open core business model, requires that to make a profit privacy becomes a secondary consideration. Companies that benefit greatly from open core, especially google profit off of commoditizing a person’s privacy therefore completely undermining much of computer security. I just feel like open core is a world of contradictions that cannot survive for long. To truly support the open source community and make sure it remains truly open source there has to be some separation between open source and open core, or closed source. The magic cauldron has never made sense to me but I feel like if it isn’t already broken it will be soon.