There are limits to what open source can do too. Perhaps it's necessary, but not sufficient?

There's limited benefit to having the source code when the community has been splintered, and the future direction is contrary to your needs. Sure, you can make your own fixes, etc, but you no longer enjoy the leverage community development.

Does that actually happen all that much? In the cases I can think of (OpenOffice.org, ffmpeg, OpenWRT), the community ended up concentrating around either the original project or the fork (in other words, the community didn’t really splinter, just move).

The BSD unixes are the classic example.

> There's limited benefit to having the source code when the community has been splintered, and the future direction is contrary to your needs. Sure, you can make your own fixes, etc, but you no longer enjoy the leverage community development.

And that's still better than being stuck with arbitrary price changes.

What you mean?

Open source completely avoid this one problem. Apache-style development was created exactly for that.

You can complain that it's way overkill and a company doesn't actually need that level of assurance. But you can't claim it's not sufficient.

Having a tarball of the source code for something isn't the same as having the community, the history, the culture, the processes, the infrastructure ... all the accumulated other stuff that makes up an open source project.

Without the concentration of diverse efforts that go into maintaining and advancing a project, having the source code (alone) is of minimal benefit.