The ratio of failed OS businesses to successful ones is worse than in prop-tech; revenue kicks in much later, business model pivots are hampered by community resistance, and licensing issues leave OS businesses vulnerable throughout their lifetime. Instead, why not do what traditional businesses are doing, sell a product, and simply charge for the value it provides?

Why not? Because when your project gets so big that lots of people rely on it, it would be better for the world to remove the private property restrictions, allowing fixes and innovations to come from anywhere and be distributed as widely as possible.

The question should be asked the other way: why not make it open source?

You see, all the objections here come from a capitalist mindset, which is based on private ownership and competition. “I built it so I own it.” That is how we ended up with a feudal society online, where conservatives are complaining they’re being silenced, where bulk collection of everyone’s info is possible in one place, where rents are being extracted from the ecosystem.

The alternative is collaboration with no private ownership of the platform. (Note that this is NOT socialism.)

Linus Torvalds launched Linux, Tim Berners launched the Web, Vitalik launched Ethereum, but they don’t “own it”. And it is precisely because there is no private ownership of the whole platform, that they have led to an explosion of wealth and utility for the entire world.

“Business models are incompatible with open source”. Well, sure. Rentseeking behavior gets harder when the platform is permissionless. But what has led to more value for the world:

AOL or the Web?

Internet Explorer or Chromium?

Britannica or Wikipedia?

Windows or Linux, BSD (including MacOS and Android)

Alchemy or Science?

This is a mindset issue in our culture. In current society the vast majority of people are living paycheck to paycheck, so they would love to escape this precarious situation. They take jobs because they pay, not so much because they like the project. When they do get financially independent, they keep going and going, trying to make more money and become a capitalist. And we all support these few people who “escaped and made it” by ensuring that their intellectual private property rights are enforced and their business models are enabled in our society (RIAA, MPAA, etc). In a society where everyone has UBI, people would work 20% of their time on stuff they like - science, open source, religion, hobbies, raising children etc. And projects would attract people because they are awesome and useful to many people, and because they can contribute something that others need.

Each small contribution to the gift economy costs very little, and there is no limit on the remixing and reusing of effective solutions. Private property is all about adding more friction to this permissionless model and excluding the rest of the world from using a resource and building on others’ discoveries. When Isaac Newton said “if I saw further, it’s because I stood on the shoulders of giants” he didn’t rent those shoulders. He wasn’t sued an a SWAT team didn’t break down his door. Isaac Newton wasn’t in pharma.

If I sound like some kind of communist, liste to the venture CAPITALISTS who fund the future and see where things are doing. For example read https://worldaftercapital.org by venture capitalist Albert Wenger general partner of Union Square Ventures to understand where we are headed as a society. And read their latest 3.0 thesis.