There are hundreds of open source companies - many making gobs of money. Not all - many fail. This team has name recognition and a few successful projects already - Babel and yarn. I can see it working out.
JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages. Millions of developers. With solid execution, there are monstrous markets here.
[citation needed]
It seems there may be many open source companies with tons of users, but they seem to struggle with monetization and turning those users into paying users.
Redhat which used to be the epitome of a company making money from open source got acquired by IBM.
A lot of other open source companies are switching to non-open source licenses.
That being said, a compiler toolchain is not so easily monetized as something like Grafana, which has obvious enterprise features that need filling in and which can be hosted as a cloud service, generating revenue that way.
I imagine the team has ideas for monetization, otherwise they would not have raised $4.5M from some top shelf venture capitalists. I would like to know what those ideas are.
> Eric Raymond, the founder of the Open Source Initiative and one of the authors of the standard-bearing Open Source Definition, said Kyle’s decision violated the fifth clause of the definition, which prohibits discrimination against people or groups.
That's true. The market is small and price-sensitive.