Open source is not the problem, but its misuse by corporations

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Anyone developing software today and charging for it has to justify themselves. Anyone giving it away for free is considered morally superior. This attitude has created a structural problem that affects the entire industry.

the next big thing – Golo Roden

Golo Roden is the founder and CTO of the native web GmbH. He works on the design and development of web and cloud applications and APIs, with a focus on event-driven and service-based distributed architectures. His guiding principle is that software development is not an end in itself, but must always follow an underlying technical expertise.

In recent decades, open source has fundamentally changed software development, mostly for the better. Open-source projects have democratized knowledge, enabled cross-company collaboration, and accelerated innovation cycles. But behind the success story lies a mechanism that surprisingly few question: Open source is no longer just a model of collaboration. It has become a strategic instrument that primarily benefits those who need it least.

When Free Becomes the Currency

There's a sentence that probably every developer has heard at least once:

“Why should I pay for it when it's available as open source?”

The question sounds pragmatic, almost reasonable. But it reveals a mindset that has become ingrained over years and has far-reaching consequences.

Open source has contributed to us systematically devaluing software work. Not the value of execution, mind you, as developers are still well-paid when employed. But the value of the intellectual effort that goes into a software product: thinking through an architecture, designing an API, solving a complex technical problem. We give all of this away for free because it's taken for granted that software should be freely available in source code.

What gets lost is the awareness that software development is not just a craft, but also intellectual creation. When an author writes a book, no one expects them to distribute it for free. When an architect designs a building, no one would think of publishing the design as open source. But with software, the expectation has been established that anything not behind a paywall must also be free. And anyone who still charges money is under pressure to justify it.

This is a remarkable development. Within a few decades, we have become accustomed to the intellectual effort behind software having no monetary value as long as it is in the form of source code. We have made free the norm and payment the exception. In doing so, we overlook that behind every library, every framework, and every tool lie hundreds or thousands of hours of thinking, designing, discarding, and rebuilding. These hours have value. But the prevailing industry narrative tells us that this value is only legitimate when someone else builds a service on top of it and sells it.

The Big Players' Game

Anyone who wants to understand why open source works the way it does today must look at those who benefit most from it. And that's not the individual developers who invest their weekends in a project. It's the big tech corporations.

Let's take PostgreSQL as an example. PostgreSQL is considered a flagship project of the open-source world: stable, powerful, and free. What many don't know or deliberately ignore: a significant portion of its development is financed by companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. The developers who drive the core of PostgreSQL are largely employed by these very corporations.

At first glance, this looks like altruism. Microsoft invests in a database that competes with its own product (SQL Server). Why would a corporation do that? The answer is disappointingly simple: Because the calculation is still worthwhile. Every PostgreSQL instance running on Azure brings Microsoft revenue. It doesn't matter if SQL Server loses market share as long as the cloud platform wins. Investing in open source is not a donation. It's a strategic decision with a calculable return.

This pattern repeats throughout the industry. Kubernetes is driven significantly by Google and Microsoft, among others. Linux is supported by all major cloud providers because it forms the basis of their infrastructure. Chromium is open source, but Google controls its direction. Wherever corporations finance open-source projects, it's not out of idealism. It's because it supports their business model.

And it goes further. Many of the major open-source projects are organized through foundations that give the appearance of neutrality and community. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the Linux Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation: they are all substantially supported by the same corporations that benefit from the projects. The foundation structure lends legitimacy to the whole thing and creates the impression that an independent community is working for the common good. In the background, however, it's often the same funders who influence the strategic direction.

It would be naive to dismiss this as a coincidence. Corporations have realized that open source is an excellent means of shaping markets without having to bear the full associated costs themselves. The community provides code, documentation, bug reports, and evangelism. The corporations provide infrastructure, hosting, and managed services. It doesn't take long to figure out who makes the better deal.

The Double Wall for Small Providers

What does this mean for those who cannot or do not want to give away software? For small companies that have to survive in the market with a commercial product?

They face a double challenge. On the one hand, they compete with the big players, who have almost unlimited resources: marketing budgets, sales structures, brand recognition. That has always been difficult. But open source has created a second barrier that is at least as effective.

Because small providers don't just compete with the corporations themselves. They also compete with the open-source alternatives financed by those same corporations. Anyone offering a commercial database doesn't just fight against Oracle and Microsoft. They also fight against PostgreSQL and the expectation that a database shouldn't cost anything because a free alternative exists.

In this way, open source becomes the moat of large corporations. Not because the corporations directly control the open-source projects, but because through financing, they have created an ecosystem where commercial alternatives struggle to even get noticed. The market is squeezed from two sides: from above by corporations with their managed services, and from below by free alternatives often co-financed by the same corporations.

As a small company in this environment offering a commercial software product, you not only have to convince technically. You first have to explain why your own product should cost anything at all. This obligation to explain exists in hardly any other industry in this form. No one asks a craftsman why their quote isn't free. No one expects a tax advisor to give away their work because a free template is available somewhere. But with software, this question is so deeply ingrained that it's often not even consciously asked. It simply resonates in every evaluation process, in every purchasing decision, in every comparison.

The result is a market that stifles innovation where it's needed most. Small, specialized providers who could solve specific problems better than generic open-source tools often don't even make it to the shortlist. Not because their products are worse, but because they are up against an expectation systematically cultivated by the big players.

The dynamic resulting from this interplay is particularly insidious. Corporations finance open-source projects that dry up the market for commercial alternatives. At the same time, they build managed services on top of these same open-source projects, which they sell profitably. The small provider thus pays twice: they lose potential customers to the free alternative and to the corporation's managed service, which is based on that very alternative.

The Community's Blind Spots

This is where it gets uncomfortable. Because corporations can only play this game because the community supports it. And not out of malice, but out of a mixture of idealism and short-sightedness.

Over decades, a conviction has solidified within the developer community that is rarely questioned: Open source is good. Commercial is suspicious. Those who give away software act in the interest of the community. Those who charge money for it have motives that need explaining.

This attitude is understandable. It is rooted in a time when software was actually overpriced, when licensing models were opaque, and vendor lock-in was the rule. Open source was the answer to real problems, and it solved many of them. But the reflexive defense of open source as a morally superior model ignores how the framework conditions have changed.

Today, open source is no longer a countermodel for large corporations. It is an integral part of their strategy. And anyone in the community who continues to defend every open-source project without asking who is behind it and who benefits from it is making themselves a tool of precisely those interests they should actually be critical of.

This is particularly evident in how maintainers who burn out on their projects are treated. The burnout rate among open-source maintainers is alarmingly high. People invest years of their spare time in projects used by millions, receiving at best recognition, at worst complaints about slow bug fixes. The community responds with pity and references to sponsorship models that hardly work in practice. What they don't do: ask the fundamental question of whether it's right for this work to be expected for free at all.

Because that is precisely the blind spot. The community defends a system that measures the value of work by the license model, not by its quality or benefit. A project is good because it's open source. Not because it solves a problem better than the alternatives. This reversal of evaluation criteria harms not only the maintainers. It harms the entire software industry because it stifles innovation where it's most urgently needed: with small, specialized providers who cannot afford to give their work away for free.

And there's another aspect that is rarely spoken: many users choose open source not out of conviction, but simply because it's free. The moral elevation serves as a convenient justification for a fundamentally economic decision. This in itself is not reprehensible. But it becomes problematic when the same people criticize others for charging for their software. A culture emerges where free is considered ethical and demanding payment is considered greedy, and where these attributions are hardly questioned anymore.

For example, when a company makes a technology decision and opts for an open-source product, it's rarely out of ideological conviction. Budget approval for a free tool is simply easier than for a commercial one. The hidden costs in the form of training, customization, and lack of support are often higher than a license fee, but this is gladly overlooked in the calculation. Open source wins the evaluation not because it's better, but because it requires less explanation.

Neither Backwards nor Business as Usual

I would rather not be misunderstood. This blog post is not a plea against open source. I don't want to go back to a time when a C compiler cost several thousand marks and a word processor was a luxury item. Open source has broken down barriers, made knowledge accessible, and fundamentally improved the way we develop software. That is an achievement that should not be downplayed.

But just as little should we close our eyes to what open source has become. Today, it is no longer just a model of collaboration and sharing. It is a strategic tool in the hands of corporations that use it to secure their market position and restrict competition. And it is a system that devalues the work of those who keep it alive.

The problem is not open source itself. The issue is the structures that have formed around open source. It's the corporations that instrumentalize open-source projects without taking responsibility for the dependency that comes with such a reliance. And it's a community that plays along with this game unreflectively, because the alternative would mean questioning cherished beliefs.

What is needed is a more nuanced view. An understanding that open source and commercial are not moral categories, but licensing models. That the question is not whether software should cost something, but who profits when it doesn't. And that the reflexive defense of “free” often plays right into the hands of those whose market power one actually wanted to limit.

Open source is not the problem. But anyone who pretends it's the solution to everything hasn't recognized the real problem yet.

(rme)