The real amnesia about “open source” history is that, at the time of the formation of the OSI, developers and companies were afraid of Free Software, Copyleft, and GNU. Making free/libre/community code palatable — even merely for re-use — was an uphill battle. Nowadays, use of open source is so pervasive that you get a strange look in developer circles when you use the word “proprietary”. And we are worrying now about paying for committer/maintainer time given how important OSS modules are, especially standard and popular programming libraries and database technologies.

That is quite the inversion. Let’s take an example: search. Elastic has gone public while employing an army of Elasticsearch and Lucene committers, and while selling SaaS and cloud services around Elasticsearch and related projects, thus paying for those committers, creating a massive ecosystem/community, and revenue for themselves (plus return for their investors). A win like that would have been unimaginable in the pre-OSI era. Companies wouldn’t adopt Elasticsearch, wouldn’t put real data in it, and certainly wouldn’t pay some company to run it for them.

Instead, that era saw companies like Verity, FAST, Autonomy, and similar proprietary search engines. Can you even name a proprietary on-premise deployable search engine today? Even if you can, it’s probably powered by Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch under the hood. That’s how much the entire universe has shifted.