If a project gets great adoption but cannot drive revenue, it will die. Some wishful thinking might argue that the community will take over, but there’s been little evidence to indicate this happens.

It’s not that open-source companies win by preventing the need for a third party; they win by allowing for the open audit of how it works.

One of the big benefits of open source is that it opens the development of niche features to the community. While the core product is typically maintained by a central engineering team, integrations or plugins are often built by community developers and then occasionally merged into the main branch.