Essentially, there are two ways of producing software. One is the ”Silicon Valley” way, where you start up as an entrepreneur in your garage, reach out to venture capitalists (VCs) who then invest into your idea, and later scale, if you’re successful - like Facebook. The second is a community way, where numerous members inspect, modify and enhance the applications that have openly available code bases. They gradually improve and add on features as the project goes along, like Linux.
Will Open Source Actually Beat Silicon Valley Start-Ups?
Open source could even do better than the proprietary model, since the inspection and debugging of it is not limited by the capacities of the team that the company hires to do the project