[college_physics]

Can't comment specifically on this or that "dying company", but it is a bit disappointing that after, how many, four decades of open source? and the obvious utility of that paradigm, it still seems a major challenge to build sustainable open source ecosystems. This means we can't really move on and imagine grander things that might build on top of each other.

Its not clear if that is due to:

i) competition from proprietary business models

ii) more specifically the excessive concentration of said proprietary business models ("big tech")

iii) confusion from conflicting objectives and monetisation incentives (the various types of licenses etc)

iv) ill-adapted funding models (venture capital)

v) intrinsic to the concept and there is no solution

vi) just not having matured yet enough

What I am driving at is that building more complex structures requires some solid foundations and those typically require building blocks following some proven blueprint. Somehow much around open source is still precarious and made up. Ideally you'd want to walk into the chamber of commerce (or maybe the chamber of open source entities), pick a name, a legal entity type, a sector and get going. You focus on your solutions, not on how to survive in a world that doesn't quite know what to make of you.

Now, corporate structures and capital markets etc took hundreds of years to settle (and are still flawed in many ways) but we do live in accelerated times so maybe its just a matter of getting our act together?

[hot_gril]

It's still doing better than it could be. Big tech companies have played way nicer than they had to, focusing more on vague long-term presence than on immediate profits, and imo continue to do so to a lesser extent. There always comes a point when the innovation is done and they lock things down again, but even then they have to fight their own employees.

[zelphirkalt]

With lots of open source licenses, there is no copyleft. Without copyleft, for profit companies can simply take the hard work, add a little on top, make it proprietary, and sell it. Customer mentality is to use the most comfortable thing, without paying attention on whom they depend, often choosing the proprietary offer, because of feature X.

There are healthy ecosystems, even some partially replacing docker, some with more daily updates than I can process, but they have copyleft licenses in place and are free software, to ensure contributions flow back. Companies can still make profit, but not from adding a minimalistic thing and making it proprietary. They need to find other ways.

[goodpoint]

> Without copyleft, for profit companies can simply take the hard work, add a little on top, make it proprietary, and sell it.

That's it. Pushover licenses are not helping at all.

[trasz3]

It's because the incentives to make money quickly end up being stronger than incentives to build a sustainable open source ecosystems.