The counterintuitive pattern of open source economics: giving away the software creates more value than selling it. Red Hat was acquired for $34 billion, GitHub for $7.5 billion, Docker valued at $2.1 billion — all built on free software. Four distinct models emerge: corporate sponsors who need the tool (Linux), paid services layers on top of free engines (Docker Enterprise), hosted platform ecosystems (Git → GitHub), and cloud strategy where the free tool is a funnel to paid infrastructure (TensorFlow → Google Cloud).
This directly reinforces the middleware-dies thesis — the software layer commoditizes while the infrastructure and services layers capture value. It also connects to SaaS survives as the governance and coordination layer — determinism still rules because what companies actually pay for is management dashboards, security scanning, support, and governance — the coordination layer around the free tool. The pattern maps to AI-native business: open-source models commoditize while Context is the product, not the model because the differentiation is in what you build around the model, not the model itself.