Software below the poverty line

But why make this point? Well, splitting the hair between profit and usage is important to measuring long-term success. If a project gets great adoption but cannot drive revenue, it will die. Some wishful thinking might argue that the community will take over, but there’s been little evidence to indicate this happens.

If you accept this premise that there is no tragedy of the commons – that open source software cannot be over-grazed by having more people use it – that freeloaders are free, and scarcity is not an applicable concept, then you’re forced to look skeptically at other assumptions we’ve been starting to make lately in the broader open source community.

Why don’t all of those Linux developers just build the enterprise layer themselves and use the profits to fund their work? To answer that question, consider the steps the Linux community would have to take to make that work: