I'm sure you can express your substantive points thoughtfully, so please do that in the future. And if you wouldn't mind reviewing the Show HN rules and the site rules, we'd be grateful:
That's technically true if you believe "open source" is just about having the right text file in a repo, but there's much more to it if you want to consider the ethics, responsibilities, and legal ramifications of how you choose to license your project.
There is absolutely nothing stopping someone creating an open source project and exploiting a market opportunity at the same time. The perception that "open source === done for altruistic reasons" is one of the most common misconceptions about OSS, and really should be changed.
Your second point, that is exactly what I wish for.
The sole purpose of this company is to bring together organizations using open source software with creators and maintainers of the software to facilitate and grow funding opportunities. This is needed so that open source can become sustainable. In order to achieve this mission, revenue is needed to make sure that we are actually capable of supporting OSS.
One of our main goals at OpenTeams is to channel more funding and resources into community-driven projects, to support transparency in their governance, and keep the communities around them healthy and accelerate their development. We do this in a way that keeps the community in charge of its destiny.
Like, the point here is that if this venture means to support open-source then it should open-source its own stuff (which means what here? Its website, I guess)?
I mean, I guess that makes sense to me? But why so much passion about this? LOL, I really don't get it. I really think I'm missing some basic background. In my mind I'm thinking "hmm, that's a good point. Kind of inconsistent..." but I never make the leap to "you clearly are NOT interested in supporting open-source".
Can someone explain it to me? I promise if any of this sounds flippant, it's unintentional. I really think there's some OSS history I'm unaware of that makes me not understand these exchanges.
First, commercial software used to be very anti open source. See [1]. As a result, there can be distrust & skepticism when commercial companies get involved in open source.
Second, there are a range of “open source” licenses reflecting a broad spectrum of values and beliefs about how much code should be shared and with what restrictions/obligations. So, people enter into the discussion from a variety of view points. Some people only use GPL or AGPL software and won’t participate in online forums unless the forum software is released under those licenses. People in that group might feel excluded from OpenTeams in the same way someone who is a strict vegan might feel excluded at a vegetarian restaurant.
[1]: “Balmer: ‘Linux is a Cancer’” (2001), https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...
Episode 32 of the Django Chat podcast touches on this topic at 34 minutes in. DHH talks about the benefits of a small group of people working fast to shape a feature before releasing it to the community. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/django-chat/id14515364...
This is exactly the approach we are taking to launch OpenTeams. By having a small "closed" group focus on launching key features, we believe that our new business model will become the default approach to helping open source projects become sustainable.