Open source is considered an exemplar of the ‘private-collective’ model of innovation,¹ a compound model with elements from both the private investment & the collective action models.

This model was an attempt to rationalise and reason about the existence of the open source software industry, and answer the question: “why would thousands of top-notch programmers contribute, without apparent material incentives, to the provision of a public good?”.²

This essay revisits the assumptions of the private-collective model, in the cloud-compute era, to understand the surgent phenomena of the open core revenue model in the commercial open source software industry. This is of particular significance in view of the perceived siege of the open source model by cloud vendors.³

Open source software is eating the world. What is eating it from the inside?

The open source movement is at an inflection point. The number, popularity, and usage of open source software is at an historic high; but the fundamental sustainability of the movement is shaky at best, non-existent at worst.

Collectiive is a collaborative public effort to search for answers to questions vital to the sustainability of open source: questions on how to make this altruistic model of innovation sustain for the next ten, thirty, hundred years. Reach out and help us ask the right questions!

Questions

• Can we make the open-source movement self-sustaining? Open source survives on philanthropy: the altruism of the initiator of an open source project, the unpaid labour of the maintainer and the individual contributor, and the monetary donations to foundations which support open source projects. Is there an alternative, self-sustaining way?

• Can we pay back for the effort of the maintainer and the individual contributor? Open source maintainers and contributors have little incentive to contribute to, improve, and sustain a project for a prolonged period of time. Continued development of a project requires continued effort. Can we provide economic incentives to the maintainers and contributors to help continued development? A host of secondary questions arise and need answers as well. For instance, how do we assign value to an open source project & contribution?

• How can an entity be incentivised to give back a portion of the value it captures from an open source project back to the community? Secondary questions are: how do we gauge the value captured by an entity from an open source project?