[quick-thoughts draft]
Open source software has generated a lot of value for the world. It has also generated a lot of value for the companies that have built their businesses on top of open source software. Yet, the value captured by the open source software community is still very small compared to the value generated by the open source software community. More than 90% of companies use open source (State of Open report by open UK). Open-source software is the foundation of 99% of the world’s software (GitHub Octoverse report Oct, 2022, Venturebeat article).
OSS used by business broadly fall under these categories:
| Revenue Stream | Examples |
|---|---|
| Selling support | Red Hat, Canonical, SUSE |
| Selling services | AWS, Google Cloud, Azure |
| Selling software | MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Redis |
| Selling hardware | Apple, Samsung, Raspberry Pi, Arduino |
| Selling data | Facebook, Google, Amazon |
| Advertisements | Google, Facebook |
| Subscriptions | Netflix, Spotify |
| Freemium | Slack, Zoom, GitHub, GitLab, Docker, |
| In-app purchases | Spotify, Netflix, Apple, Google, |
| Platform fees | Android Play Store (Google), Microsoft Store (Microsoft), Apple App Store (Apple), Steam (Valve), Epic Games Store (Epic Games), Discord (Discord) |
| Donations | Linux Foundation, Apache Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation, OpenStreetMap Foundation, Wikipedia, |
| Selling training, certifications | Udemy, Coursera, Pluralsight, LinkedIn Learning (Lynda), Udacity, edX, Khan Academy, |
| Selling event tickets | Linux Foundation, Open Source Summit, ApacheCon, FOSDEM, PyCon, JSConf, NodeConf, DockerCon, KubernetesCon, CloudNativeCon, OpenStack Summit |
| Consulting | Red Hat, Canonical, SUSE |
| Selling books | O’Reilly, Manning |
Examples: Linux Foundation, Open Source Summit, ApacheCon, FOSDEM, PyCon, JSConf, NodeConf, DockerCon, KubernetesCon, CloudNativeCon, OpenStack Summit 
A sample set:
| Startup | Value Offered | Value Capture | Latest Funding | Total Funding |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anyscale.com Code, | Scale AI and Python Applications Effortlessly. Based on Ray OSS | Free, usage-based Pricing | $99M Series C2, Aug 23, 2022 | $259M |
| Budibase.com Code | Build apps, forms, and workflows using no-code tools. | Freemium, usage-based cloud Pricing | $7M Seed3, Nov 4, 2022 | $9.2M |
| Hasura.io Code | Build modern apps, APIs 10x faster using instant GraphQL | Licensing, cloud service + usage-based Pricing | $100M Series C, Feb 22, 2022 | $136.5M |
| Plausible.io Code | Privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative | pageviews/usage-based Pricing | ? | ? |
| Supabase.com Code | Firebase alternative with full PostgreSQL, Auth, Storage, Edge functions, Subscriptions and instant APIs | Freemium, cloud service + usage-based Pricing | $80M Series B, May 10, 2022 | $116.1M |
| … | … | … | … | … |
