While looking for interesting information for infographics, I found some really nice articles explaining why blockchain industry can benefit from "commercial open source" model of development.
Thus I have prepared relatevely small conclusion for you.
Blockchains and commercial open source models.
Open nature of blockchains.
Bitcoin was released as an open source project in January 2009. In 2010, realizing that quite a few of these elements can be tweaked, the community that had aggregated around Bitcoin, often on the bitcointalk forums, started experimenting with them.
Along the way, many variations of the Bitcoin codebase (forks) have appeared, which became first generation blockchains. First and next generation blockchains, public and private blockchains, in it's majority, are all open source projects.
The goal of using a blockchain is to raise the level of trust participants have in the network and the data it produces—ideally, enough to be able to use it as is, without further work. Reaching this level of trust is possible only if the software that powers the network is free and open source. Even a correctly distributed proprietary blockchain is essentially a collection of independent agents running the same third party's code. By nature, it's necessary—but not sufficient—for a blockchain's source code to be open source. This has both been a minimum guarantee and the source of further innovation as the ecosystem keeps growing.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that while the open nature of blockchains has been a source of innovation and variation, it has also been seen as a form of governance: governance by code, where users are expected to run whichever specific version of the code contains a function or approach they think the whole network should embrace. In this respect, one can say the open nature of some blockchains has also become a cop-out regarding governance.
GitHub is full of neglected blockchain projects.
There’s actually a really good report by Deloitte titled Evolution of Blockchain Technology: Insights from the GitHub Platform. Although it was published in late 2017, their point still stands.
"The mortality rate of projects is often an essential factor in understanding project centrality and the emergence of protocols and best practices. For commercial purposes, since few projects will likely survive, understanding the factors that contribute to a project’s mortality may be an essential skill for firms wishing to piggyback on a successful code, emulate successful projects, or build in-house capabilities. Note that about 90 percent of projects developed on GitHub become idle, and the average life span of a project is about one year, with the highest mortality rate occurring within the first six months."
According to the report, a lot of projects become inactive because they are developed by users (and not organizations), who are more prone to tinker, develop and prototype ideas that often do not gain traction, they only have one commiter or other users aren’t interested in forking the repos.
However, in analyzing blockchain repositories and their content, Deloitte noticed that increasingly more organizations appear to be getting involved. It seems that projects owned by organizations are updated more frequently but that shouldn’t come as a shock. Whenever an organization backs a project, its chance of success increases.
It turns out that the majority of the most successful open source projects are supported either by a foundation, a company, or a consortium of companies collaborating together.
Commercial open source.
Software foundations such as ASF survive on donations and other income streams such as sponsorships, conference fees, etc. But those funds are primarily used to run the foundations, to provide legal protection for the projects, and to ensure there are enough servers to run builds, issue trackers, mailing lists, etc.
Similarly, CNCF has member fees and other income streams, which are used to run the foundation and provide resources for the projects. These days, most software is not built on laptops; it is run and tested on hundreds of machines on the cloud, and that requires money. Creating marketing campaigns, brand designs, distributing stickers, etc. takes money, and some foundations can assist with that as well. At its core, foundations implement the right processes to interact with users, developers and control mechanisms and ensure distribution of available financial resources to open source projects for the common good.
If users of open source projects can donate money and the foundations can distribute it in a fair way, what is missing?
What is missing is a direct, transparent, trusted, decentralized, automated bidirectional link for transfer of value between the open source producers and the open source consumer.
Currently, the link is either unidirectional or indirect:
Unidirectional: A developer (think of a "developer" as any role that is involved in the production, maintenance, and distribution of software) can use their brain juice and devote time to do a contribution and share that value with all open source users. But there is no reverse link.
Indirect: If there is a bug that affects a specific user/company, the options are:
To have in-house developers to fix the bug and do a pull request. That is ideal, but it not always possible to hire in-house developers who are knowledgeable about hundreds of open source projects used daily.
To hire a freelancer specializing in that specific open source project and pay for the services. Ideally, the freelancer is also a committer for the open source project and can directly change the project code quickly. Otherwise, the fix might not ever make it to the project.
To approach a company providing services around the open source project. Such companies typically employ open source committers to influence and gain credibility in the community and offer products, expertise, and professional services.
The third option has been a successful model for sustaining many open source projects. Whether they provide services (training, consulting, workshops), support, packaging, open core, or SaaS, there are companies that employ hundreds of staff members who work on open source full time. There is a long list of companies that have managed to build a successful open source business model over the years, and that list is growing steadily.
The companies that back open source projects play an important role in the ecosystem: They are the catalyst between the open source projects and the users. The ones that add real value do more than just package software nicely; they can identify user needs and technology trends, and they create a full stack and even an ecosystem of open source projects to address these needs. They can take a boring project and support it for years. If there is a missing piece in the stack, they can start an open source project from scratch and build a community around it. They can acquire a closed source software company and open source the projects (Red Hat).
To summarize, with the commercial open source model, projects are officially or unofficially managed and controlled by a very few individuals or companies that monetize them and give back to the ecosystem by ensuring the project is successful. It is a win-win-win for open source developers, managing companies, and end users. The alternative is inactive projects and expensive closed source software.
Below you can find links to full articles:
https://opensource.com/article/18/6/blockchain-guide-next-generation#
https://jaxenter.com/blockchain-projects-life-expectancy-145986.html
https://opensource.com/article/18/8/open-source-tokenomics#
https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/industry/financial-services/evolution-of-blockchain-github-platform
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