Comment by matrss
> What happens when it's no longer fun, but 150,000 people depend on it for their job?
Then someone else can take over, or not, depending on how important it really is to those 150000.
From the perspective of a business, using open source is strictly safer than closed source. With closed source, if the entity owning the code goes bankrupt, increases licensing fees substantially, just axes the project (incidentally what Google is also known for) or looses interest in some other way, you are out of luck. Go find something similar and hope there is a migration path. With open source, the equivalent is the maintainer walking away because they are bored, and you have the code right there to take over, or pay someone else to do so.
> I question the validity of open-sourcing anything for fun unless you design the licence, and more, to enable you to walk away and/or get bored.
Every open source license is already designed so that you can just walk away for whatever reason, e.g. when you are bored.
exactly, there is always a risk, no matter the type of software you use. people just have to learn to manage that risk.