Reading 09: The Magic Cauldron

 I think that the "service instead of software" is definitely an interesting business model, as it goes against the norm of traditional 'hey here is something with a price tag on it'. I think that because of the nature of how software has been shared throughout the history of computing, it makes sense for this business model to be implemented. It has been the computer and programming culture for important programs to be free, as originally computing was just a hobby and the knowledge that was shared was mostly academic in nature. But, as computing grew, the culture around free and open information was kept, leading to this model when businesses and programmers started to need to make money from it. This business model does this without affecting or disrupting the original free culture. 

I think that ESR's remarks about the closed-source bs open-source approach when it comes to independent peer review is interesting, and correct for the most part. I don't think that it forecloses every possibility of truly independent peer review in every situation, as a lot of paid-for proprietary software is peer reviewed today. Examples of this include all of Adobe's software suite, such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Premiere Pro, etc. These are all very well reviewed and institutionally-beloved software that does come with a pretty hefty upfront cost. However, I do believe that ESR is still correct as in nearly every other circumstance, paid for software developed by smaller institutions than Adobe are usually informationally-clouded and not as well understood and reviewed by peers. A lot of these can be seen as scams too, especially if they are web-based. If something is paid-for online, a lot of the time it can be malware that is just trying to get your credit card number and scam you. Open-source web software does not usually have this problem, as the only scam that can come from downloading this software is the same scam and risk that you would have downloading anything off of the internet - the download is actually malware that will infect your computer. 

I think that open-core as a business model is again, just another way that developers have found to be able to maintain the open-source culture while also being able to make some money off of their product. I think that it is tangential to the nature of open-source culture, and it doesn't really affect how people will view open-source as a whole. Open-core is another tool in the arsenal of open source developers being able to make money off of projects that better fit to their personal ideologies and views on how open-source their project should be. I think that open source is constantly evolving and developing, and this is another point to show this off. 

Open-source, with no monetization at all, only makes business sense if there are donation links or it does not need to sustain itself and it is a passion project. If it needs to sustain itself, make a profit, or pay people's salaries, then completely open source does not make economic sense. Tangential open-source-style business models such as the ones above are probably the best if the developer wishes to maintain the open-source style of branding and accessibility.