Here's why investors are throwing money at startups that give away their software for free

From mergers and acquisitions to massive amounts of funding, commercial open source software companies made a splash last year. Confluent, Neo4j, HashiCorp and GitLab are just a few examples of commercial open source software startups that raised major rounds of funding. Investors are excited about open source because it's what developers want, and it's what customers want. Although these startups give away some of their software for free, their business model also makes marketing, sales,...