Or another way to look at it: software that volunteers can't/won't develop and thus will only exist if a company can sustain itself vs. software that volunteers can and will develop.

Open source software, by and large, is not maintained by volunteers, and I think the view of it is harmful to understanding how open source works.

The vast, vast, vast majority of open source software was created by engineers at for-profit companies where, through their line of work, they faced a problem, and after solving it had the insight "hey, other companies may have this problem". On the flip side, the vast majority of maintainers are engineers at for-profit companies who face new problems related to the software every day, and share their solutions back so we can all benefit from everyone else's work.

Its not the old fable of the greybeard in his basement tirelessly maintaining some internet-critical piece of software (though, those definitely exist). Its: "Hey, your business uses Kubernetes and derives millions in revenue either directly or indirectly from it? Mind helping keep it going?"

This is critical to understand because: Vault and Terraform could absolutely have been sustained and grown by the community of its users. There is zero doubt in my mind of this. List the top 50 websites by traffic volume, and every single one of those companies uses both of these products, extensively; many of the companies have engineers devoting effort toward projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Javascript, or Postgres. Vault and Terraform aren't even close to a situation of "but who maintains it"; Hashicorp just refused to let anyone have power in the project that wasn't on their payroll. Far more open source projects die due to this than a lack of interest in maintenance.

The root problem isn't profit motive; its venture capital. To some degree, it is also: projects created to solve the problems of their users before their creators actually have the same problem.

I don't think nginx is a good example though. They have a lot of features they refuse to get contributed as they want them paywalled in nginx-plus

Like service discovery and better load balancing algorithms.

Isn’t it though? Nginx (org) allows companies like Kong (org) to exist?

I honestly think that’s a better relationship, kong basically advertises nginx (seems that nginx also talks about kong openly)… and yet both have enterprise services. They may not be in direct competition but they do have overlap. That’s what good competition looks like.

Edit: I do not know if kong pays nginx.

I think you make a solid distinction between two very different types of software, though I'm not sure I agree with your examples, specifically. If Linux didn't have the wide-spread usage and network of distributions that it currently does, there would be very little difference between it and Elastic, HC or Mongo. When it was originally gaining popularity, the general feeling of the technology world was that it was crazy to give away an operating system.

The "Public good software" you refer to is much better represented by things like Capital One's Cloud Custodian, or the massive number of software libraries in NPM, PYPI, and all over GitHub.

> Software made by startups that are precious to HN. In this case, building a business on top of them is "freeloading" and it's deeply immoral. Examples: Elastic, HashiCorp, Mongo

I don't believe it's nearly as cut and dry as this post claims. The companies who are "freeloading" are usually undertaking massive efforts to be able to run the software in a very different environment than it was originally designed for. Building a hosting solution like AWS, with the high availability solutions they offer, is an incredibly complex problem, and they're adding significant value on top of the original software. Without solutions like DocumentDB and OpenSearch, many companies would not be able to build the solutions that they have built with AWS. Additionally, if we take this stance, are these companies not "freeloading" on the open source contributors' efforts?

One could argue that cloud providers' contributions to upstream could be more significant, but how much of what AWS has developed would be useful to anyone who isn't running at their scale, and using the same solutions for the physical layer?

I see two real problems, here:

    * A lack of foresight on the part of the companies who originally built their businesses based on software with overly permissive license (Elastic is probably a good example, as they decided to pivot to SaaS _after_ they built a company on the premise of open source software). If they wanted to control other peoples' use of the software to the extend that they are complaining about now, they should not have chosen MIT/MPL/BSD/Apache licenses.

    * Changes in leadership which result in a major change in business model which is no-longer in line with the original goals of the companies (I believe HC probably falls in with this bunch). In this case, the new leadership has effectively "bought" something without doing their due diligence. They thought they had all of the keys to the kingdom, but they didn't understand that what they were buying.

In either case, it's not the fault of those who saw an opportunity to build on the work of others. The moral of the story is: don't give away your core intellectual property if your business model depends on monetizing it.