Commercialization of Open Source

In Chapter 1, The Whats and Whys of Open Source, we talked about how open source was the realm of hackers and counter-culture movements and considered by many as the antithesis of commercial software. This is the case due to the actions of some prominent commercial software vendors in response to open source. Microsoft was known to be a primary opponent to open source back in the 1990s and early 2000s with the internal stance of “embrace and extend,” which was a tactic used with other competitive software vendors to gain dominance over a market. Using that same strategy with open source generally isn’t successful, as with its “scratch-your-own-itch” model, open source projects cover spaces that might not be profitable for a commercial product to exist in. Or many times, it’s the ability to view and modify the source code itself that is valuable, and that’s something commercial software generally can&...