It’s been a while since I wrote my first chapter on this series and the response to it has been extremely muted. I know there are many silent readers (when I read blogs, I’m one of them), but I’ve also presented these ideas to conferences and to fellow developers, where I had an opportunity to press for responses.

Very few seem to care (much) about funding. I’ve come up with a few facts that could explain why that is so:

• Almost every developer loves using open source software (freedom, extensibility, community, cost)
• Some developers enjoy developing open source software (as a hobby, as a way of contributing back, for gaining work experience)
• Most developers dislike topics of entrepreneurship/business, which is generally best left to other people, explaining the duos Jobs/Wozniak, Gates/Ballmer, as well as the propensity for accelerators of the like of YCombinator to prefer duos/teams
• Developers that do like entrepreneurship/business often prefer a proprietary business model, which is more straightforward to sell.

Which leaves the subset [ developers enjoying developing OSS ] ∩ [ that like business ] ∩ [ that like an OSS model ] to be rather tiny.

It is a rather unfortunate situation, because while the growth of open source software is not only evident, but predictable, relative to my lifetime it remains a slow growth. Things could be better. A big part of the slow growth are permissive licenses (MIT, Apache2, BSD, etc.), which allow open source software to be placed into proprietary packages, for the benefits of none but a narrow set of people. If we switched all open source software to the AGPL tomorrow, the world would quickly be forced into a serious rethink of the software business models.

But the subset [ developers enjoying developing OSS ] ∩ [ that like business ] ∩ [ that like an OSS model ] ∩ [ that care about software licensing ] is rather microscopic.