# Why competition conflicts with the collaborative economics of open source software

DevFeed: [Why competition conflicts with the collaborative economics of open source software](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/so-you-want-to-compete-with-or-replace-open-source-20808.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://drewdevault.com/blog/So-you-want-to-compete-with-FOSS/>)

Author: July

Published: 2024-07-16T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Drew DeVault](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/drew-devault.md>)

Topics: [Open Source](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/open-source.md>), [foss](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/foss.md>), [Software](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/software.md>), [Development](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/development.md>)

Tags: [development](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/development.md>), [foss](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/foss.md>), [open-source](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/open-source.md>), [software](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software.md>)

## AI overview

The article argues that open source software succeeds through collaboration, shared research and development costs, and cross-company talent. It contends that business models centered on competing with or replacing open source conflict with the collaborative economics that make FOSS effective.

## Source excerpt

We are living through an interesting moment in source-available software.1 The open source movement has always had, and continues to have, a solid grounding in grassroots programmers building tools for themselves and forming communities around them. Some looming giants brought on large sums of money - Linux, Mozilla, Apache, and so on - and other giants made do without, like GNU, but for the most part if anyone thought about open source 15 years ago they were mostly thinking about grassroots communities who built software together for fun. With the rise of GitHub and in particular the explosion of web development as an open platform, commercial stakeholders in software caught on to the compelling economics of open source. The open source boom that followed caused open source software to have an enormous impact on everyone working in the software industry, and, in one way or another, on everyone living on planet Earth. Over the past decade or so, a lot of businesses, particularly startups, saw these economics unfolding in front of them and wanted to get in on this boom. A lot of talented developers started working on open source software with an explicit aim towards capitalizing on it, founding businesses and securing capital investments to build their product - an open source product. A few years following the onset of these startups, the catch started to become apparent. While open source was proven to be incredibly profitable and profoundly useful for the software industry as a whole, the economics of making open source work for one business are much different. It comes down to the fact that the free and open source software movements are built on collaboration, and all of our success is attributable to this foundation. The economics that drew commercial interest into the movement work specifically because of this collaboration - because the FOSS model allows businesses to share R&D costs and bring together talent across corporate borders into a great melting pot