Everything is awesome

Posted Aug 28, 2025 22:18 UTC (Thu) by Flozza (subscriber, #170294)
Parent article: Report: the state of commercial open source

“ Everything, it seems, is great, and COSS companies make a lot of money for their investors” hahaha thank you for this line!

When you read a report that is only positives with no downsides you know you’re reading marketing and not any kind of research. How you can publish this after BUSL and other OSS debacles and not take a critical view is beyond me.

And a personal pet peeve for the “cryptography” company that’s really just blockchain (and apparently AI somehow).

Everything is awesome

Posted Sep 3, 2025 14:30 UTC (Wed) by KernelNomad (guest, #179148) [Link]

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback 🙏

A couple of clarifications:

- The intent of the report is not to produce “marketing,” but to aggregate long-term data on how COSS companies perform financially vs. peers. That lens naturally emphasizes outcomes that investors care about, but we agree it should not be read as a full industry audit.

- You’re absolutely right that OSS has its share of challenges (license changes, governance breakdowns, company failures). In fact, we’ve noted BUSL and others as examples of how fragile the balance between community and commerce can be — we’ll make sure to expand this angle further in future editions.

- On categorization (e.g., blockchain/crypto/AI companies), we try to stick to a transparent methodology: if a company’s core product is open source and commercialized, it’s included. We welcome debate on where to draw that line — it’s part of why we publish openly.

Our goal is to start conversations, not close them — so comments like yours are exactly the kind of pushback that helps us improve.

(I'm one of the co author of the report)