The sustainability of open source software has been murky ever since cloud computing and mobile operating systems showed serious traction. Neither cloud or mobile are what they are today without open source, yet providing open source software in a financially sustainable manner in either ecosystem is becoming evermore challenging.

Cloud computing would seem to offer endless opportunities for open source software based businesses, yet we’re seeing moves by companies like Elastic, Grafana, and MongoDB change their open source licenses to fend off the cloud vendors who often package the software from those companies and offer them as managed services, while paying the companies behind the code nothing. There should be no tears for any of the companies making these license changes. Elastic and MongoDB have multi-billion dollar market caps. Grafana is having no problems raising funds. And yet, what are the prospects for the next big open source server side project to build a sustainable business with a more permissible license? How many VCs are going to invest in those projects knowing that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are more than happy to adopt the project and turn it into a managed service that is only a few clicks away from being used by thousands of customers? There have been a number of attempts to head off these situations, including open core models that provide core functionality as open source, while saving the enterprise goodies for those who plop down the cash. Neither more restrictive open source licenses or open core are long-term solutions. They postpone the inevitable. Just ask Elastic about OpenSearch.

Mobile is even more challenging for open source software. Apple and Google not only control their mobile operating systems, but they dictate the ecosystem, with Apple controlling everything from the hardware to the software to the distribution of third party apps. While it is possible to side load apps on most Android devices, a majority of people will not trouble themselves. If you want to distribute an app for iOS or Android, you play by Apple or Google’s rules. Those rules can change fast and without warning. And if you provide ways to pay for the app, be prepared to give 30% of the cut to the operating system vendors. The state of open source for mobile is not promising due to how restrictive the major mobile operating systems are.

Enter blockchain and cryptocurrency. The most popular blockchains, and those with the most potential, are all open source and breed an open source ecosystem built on top of them. Instead of creating open source software and then figuring out a business model, blockchain/cryptocurrency software projects have economics built-in. Software composability is not simply an engineering goal in blockchain, but expected and encouraged. Not all problems are magically solved with blockchain, but the ability to generate income from open source software on blockchain is not something that needs to be stitched in afterwards in weird ways like the models mentioned earlier or other approaches like a “tip jar” where the precedent is set that the project is only worth what the kindness of strangers are willing to “tip”. The expectation on blockchain is that there is a price for the use of the resources and there is value provided by the software running on top of the given chain.

Based on observations and conversations I’ve had with a variety of people in tech over the last few years, there is a lot of skepticism about the prospects of blockchain in general, and maybe even more so from those who are big supporters of open source software. The skepticism is not all that different from skepticism of cryptocurrency in general. Funny money. Environmental disaster. Doesn’t scale. Unnecessary. Most of these objections against crypto soften when digging into more details. I’ve found that most objections end up being mostly driven by the person simply not buying into this next generation of decentralized services. Never mind that the combination of composability + built-in finance goes a long way to solve some of the biggest challenges open source faces today.

My argument is not one of “put it all on the blockchain” - problems solved. There are problems that can be solved with blockchain and others that should never consider the approach. But where blockchain is a legitimate option, open source software developers should seriously consider the opportunities.