Serena Capital released a report on “The Data-Backed Financial Case from 25 Years of Commercial Open Source.”

It mentions that “High-profile deals — Red Hat’s $34B sale to IBM, HashiCorp’s $6.4B acquisition, and MongoDB’s $30B+ public valuation — undermine the argument that Open Source is not a viable financial model.”

However, the report defines open source broadly, as “companies whose products rely on publicly accessible source code — whether under an OSI-approved license, open weights in AI, or products with a meaningful open-source component alongside proprietary features.” That’s probably overbroad for what most people consider to be COSS.

Even so, it’s good to see the sector being taken seriously.