A few days ago, I ran into a pretty good article on the corporate use (and abuse) of open source software written by someone who does not appear to be an opponent of open source at all. Rather, the opposite appears to be true. Yet, his comments are well worth considering. First of all, regarding the possible sources of revenue for open source projects:

People have various answers for open source business models. E.g. "consulting" or the vague “support”. I always wonder if such people ever tried selling consulting? Or maybe “support”.

People don’t buy these things. Especially in a downturn economy. The way sales people typically sell these things is the hint that you might violate a license and it would be much easier if you paid and got the commercial license. I’ll even throw in the “support” for free. Yes, you can get some sponsors if you spend all your time on the phone. It’s a never-ending sales process. Chasing leads and making calls. Running this sort of business requires a lot of overhead.

Yes, I know. Everyone likes to use Red Hat as an example. However, that is only one company, and a very large at that. On top of that, it was acquired by an even larger behemoth. It's hardly an example for a small open source project, or even a middle-sized company. In the end, I'm afraid the author is correct: the best way to make any money with an open source project is by providing support and consulting services, yes, but also by releasing the code with multiple licenses and building proprietary add-ons on top of it.

And then, we have the corporate approach to open source:

The bad thing is corporate cynicism. Take Google. They open sourced Android when it had no users. Companies built on top of it and so did developers. Advocacy formed around it because “it’s open source”. Then they released the closed source Google Play Services which later added the SaaS Firebase requirement for some essential functionality (it’s free for that at the moment) and now we have deep vendor closed source dependencies masquerading as open source.

(...)

Open source is becoming a corporate-only game. It’s used as a weapon between battling tech companies. There’s a name for this in retail: loss leader.

In retail, a big supermarket store would sell some products at a loss and advertise this amazingly low price. This brings in audiences who buy other things along the way and so the supermarket ends up making a profit. But the reason for this is to drown out the competition. The competition seems expensive (since they can’t sell at a loss). They go out of business, and the big retail company raises prices. Initially, it looks like we got a tremendous deal from the competition, but ultimately we end up losing. Because of that some regulators prohibit such practices as they end up destroying a market.

Open source is used in a similar, cynical way by big tech. They form “communities” by hiring armies of developer relations professionals to create a masquerade of grassroots enthusiasm. Sometimes they don’t need to monetize the market, it’s enough to keep the competition out.

Let's be honest. How many companies are just using open source projects for their infrastructure, and even as the foundation for their own projects but contributing very little? The way things are, open source has become the easiest way for large corporations to reduce costs by outsourcing whole chunks of development for free. {link to this entry}

My son recently ran into an issue where he needed to find out which package installs a particular file on Debian. The problem, though, is that the data had to come from the repos because the package is not installed. Otherwise, it would be possible to run the following command:

$ dpkg -S /usr/include/pcreposix.h
libpcre3-dev:amd64: /usr/include/pcreposix.h

In other words, he was looking for something similar to the command pacman -F [filename] on ArchLinux. In the end, I found the answer here: install and run the command apt-file. For example:

$ apt-file find pcreposix.h
emboss-lib: /usr/lib/emboss/include/epcre/pcreposix.h
libpcre3-dev: /usr/include/pcreposix.h

Keep in mind that you may want to run apt-file update as root to make sure its database is up to date. {link to this entry}