Because business world discovered it was the only way to actually make money with open source, either by selling hardware or services.
Forking and managing has a cost associated with it too.
If your own DC burns down you also have nothing.
There is no "wrong way" just a different ways to evaluate risks-benefits and choosing whatever works best for your case.
100% this. As soon as you fork a project, you are now responsible for the evolution of it (even if that's just merging in upstream changes). It puts a large burden on engineering teams to track changes and maintain the fork.
Re:Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian
by std_throwaway on Friday July 27, 2018 @11:41AM
(#17626776)
OpenOffice is dead but its fork, LibreOffice, lives on.
You don't necessarily have to fork it, just the possibility of the fork changes the game. It means that the original maintainer cannot shut you down. If enough people deem a fork useful they can work together.
Of course there's a cost associated with it. But how much is it compared to the risk of someone shutting a core element of your business down? You have to evaluate.
Unfortunately the whole world seems to be heading the wrong way with cloud based "everything as a service" where you control nothing. If the provider or cloud goes down you have nothing. Even if they just take your keys you have nothing. It's quick and easy to setup and convenient but you're basically a hostage.