In my next blog post, I plan on making up some numbers which strongly disagree with this 90%/6 month figure. That counts as proof, right?

Wow, really, you are making educated guesses on statistics as precise as 90%? The headline is clearly linkbait (unless you provide data).

In fact, I wouldn't even have been comfortable with "Majority of startups on TC die within 6 months". There is simply no data cited.

What's really impressive, is that it still work somehow...

Completely agree.

@Droob : Yes and no, for sure, if you look at the BSD license or the MIT or whatever, there is not reciprocity implied, but if you look at the GPL, there is. If you look at that piece (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.en.html) for example, it's pretty obvious there is a certain "brotherhood" mind implied.

But I think that even if there were no reciprocity implied, giving is more or less morally mandatory (for the bandwidth, hosting cost, etc) ...