What's up with the recent trend of YC being open source? Is it an ideology thing, a sign of confidence, or is it really that consumers prefer open source software?
To be fair, we were open source before we got into YC. YC didn't mandate any business model, and the vast majority of our batchmates (empirically, 90%) were closed-source.
> Is it an ideology thing, a sign of confidence, or is it really that consumers prefer open source software?
I personally think it's a competitive advantage for distribution, differentiation, and attracting talent. Also as an engineer, I just like OSS.
I don't think this is unhealthy for open-source, and I hope we're transparent about that. The code is still free and self-hostable under Apache 2.0.