The Open Source Business
Give the software itself away, and earn from support and operation. The ground under this trade was a legal invention of 1989: the GPL. Not a surrender of copyright but a use of it — forcing the same freedom onto everything derived. They call it copyleft. This map holds two models that spread because a patent was let go (the razor blade, the QR code); this one runs the other way, using the force of the right to manufacture freedom. Richard Stallman's phrasing is the famous one: the «free» here means free as in free speech, not free as in free beer. The business shape was built by Red Hat, founded 1993, whose co-founder Bob Young wrote an essay called «Giving It Away» setting out the idea of free software and paid support. It went public in 1999, and in 2019 IBM bought it for thirty-four billion dollars — the largest purchase in IBM's history. What was given away for nothing came to be worth that.
The myth, corrected
Open source is a settled, winning business model
Lately it has been running the other way. MongoDB in 2018, HashiCorp in 2023 and Redis in 2024 each closed their licences, citing free-riding by the big cloud providers — and each time, the people shut out took the code and went their own way. A month or so after HashiCorp's announcement, OpenTofu was inside the Linux Foundation; when Redis did it, AWS and Google — the very firms being shut out — appeared as founding members of the rival Valkey. What you have opened, it turns out, is no longer yours to close.