It seems pretty common for tech companies/projects touting openness and freedom becoming that which they fight against. Witness all of the issues Firefox have fallen prey over the years. I remember a decade ago when Ubuntu first added Amazon integration into search results. CyanogenMod losing its way, the company behind it commercializing it and signing the partnership with Microsoft. Seems like it happens a lot.
Absolutely - I have noticed the same in effectively all startups. I'm not even out of high school yet, so take my words with a pinch of salt, but my guess would be all companies may start out as 'enthusiast' brands, of sorts. Since their market is well defined and not very large, once they outgrow their market, investors who want higher returns and more revenue probably push them to expand outside their original market, thus reducing their focus on the original market.
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong. Also, what is CyanogenMod? And why did Ubuntu add Amazon products to its search results?
Put bluntly: We live in a world that success is most often, and routinely, measured in currency. If a company can't convert users into direct paying customers (e.g., I give them money, they give me a service, not talking about ads means you the product type customer) in one way or another, they may instead either turn the customer into the product (ads, for instance) or seek profitable partnerships to sustain the organization and themselves
I can't always blame them, really, families need to be fed, people need to feel like it's worth it, and so on. In so many ways, it really does suck because I feel like it stifles innovative ideas, particularly ones that need long term execution. Look at Redis and licensing, it's the same thing, really, in terms of struggle.
If we had a separate way for engineers / companies to fall back where they did not have to worry about this in the same way, then I believe this wouldn't happen the same way, if at all, in many of these circumstances.
It's just jarring because a lot of these projects I'm talking about straddle the line between mission-driven nonprofits and companies trying to monetize that space. Mozilla is both. Canonical is a company, it just happens to be based around a mission-driven open source product. Ditto for CyanogenMod, or Brave.
