I appreciate the thought, but I would still appreciate it if you removed the tweet or included the entire conversation.

In my comment, I tried to make the point that I think you are confusing what the “bazaar” represents. Few if any individual projects were ever a bazaar in themselves. Perhaps Linux, Apache and some large projects but most OSS are small projects run by one person.

The bazaar is the community that turns up new projects, which is why there are so many options available today. In a bazaar there is not just one vendor of drinks and one of food and one of clothes. There are many and it’s the variety that allows it to be healthy.

It is hard to have individuals spend time on operational tasks like testing, debugging and upgrading. This is why few open source projects will survive more than a few versions, after a while it becomes maintenance work which no one enjoys. However, the bazaar provides an answer through a new OSS project that improves on the last one — continuing the cycle.

You need to take that dynamic into account to understand the economics of open source.