Right, but we look at examples like Chromium and we can see where there is still so much potential for things to go sideways. GabeN and his yacht could sink to the bottom of the sea and his estate sells control of Valve to someone less benevolent.
A commercial entity that has enough control over a project pushes the direction of that project in their favor. And sure you can fork a FOSS project at any time, but once the commercialized version has enough saturation, user inertia and lack of experienced developers to take that initiative often prevents alternatives from achieving success.
I think the big difference is Valve isn’t really in control of many of the projects they’re funding, they’re mostly just bringing in existing maintainers as contractors and letting them work on what they want.
Chromium on the other hand has always been something Google has explicitly been in direct control of.
Right, but we look at examples like Chromium and we can see where there is still so much potential for things to go sideways. GabeN and his yacht could sink to the bottom of the sea and his estate sells control of Valve to someone less benevolent.
A commercial entity that has enough control over a project pushes the direction of that project in their favor. And sure you can fork a FOSS project at any time, but once the commercialized version has enough saturation, user inertia and lack of experienced developers to take that initiative often prevents alternatives from achieving success.
I think the big difference is Valve isn’t really in control of many of the projects they’re funding, they’re mostly just bringing in existing maintainers as contractors and letting them work on what they want.
Chromium on the other hand has always been something Google has explicitly been in direct control of.