AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
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AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
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Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#2I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch.
CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it.
Do people here have examples of companies that are taking innovative approaches to the licensing/OSS question?
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#3[deleted]
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#4I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch. CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it. Do people here have examples of comp…
Elastic? They basically build a lot of extra (and very useful) functionality outside elasticsearch and sell that.
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#5Agreed, the dream of a megacap open source company is dead. Mongodb shows this, the Unity fiasco (I'm surprised nobody has put the two together) shows this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400 Guys, charge for your work. Don't place the economic value of your company to be ancillary to your product. That just invites another company that has that ancillary as their core competency to come and do it much better than you while you waste time creating this free thing that other people free-ride off of.
More on unity: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-chan...
Here's the main difference between unreal and unity. Unreal costs 5% royalty per sale, meaning their product is extremely expensive to the developer if sales are high. Unity is generally royalty free and relies on "support and services" to make money. This is why Unreal will always encourage the growth of the ecosystem while Unity jealously guards the actual profit centers of the business, because Unity makes nothing on its core product!
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#6I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch. CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it. Do people here have examples of comp…
But why did Red Hat succeed then? (this is a genuine question, I'd have guessed IBM would re-package RH's products, and Oracle failed with their Unbreakable Linux)
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#7I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch. CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it. Do people here have examples of comp…
Elastic? They basically build a lot of extra (and very useful) functionality outside elasticsearch and sell that.
They still suffer from the same problem: AWS is selling it's own elasticsearch service. It comes with a set of severe restrictions and is way less capable than elastics own offering, but it's improving and I see it used more and more often.
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#8I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch. CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it. Do people here have examples of comp…
But why did Red Hat succeed then? (this is a genuine question, I'd have guessed IBM would re-package RH's products, and Oracle failed with their Unbreakable Linux)
I think it is because Red Hat sold support and training.
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#9I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch. CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it. Do people here have examples of comp…
But why did Red Hat succeed then? (this is a genuine question, I'd have guessed IBM would re-package RH's products, and Oracle failed with their Unbreakable Linux)
I think RH's longevity meant that it was already in a stronger position. There was also the kernel build obfuscation that happened to supposedly twhart unbreakable linux from taking everything wholesale.
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#10I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch. CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it. Do people here have examples of comp…
I don't know if it's innovative, but you can look at https://www.nexedi.com/. They are open source, you can find all their projects on their gitlab: https://lab.nexedi.com/nexedi.
They are selling services and the fact that you have to understand a lot of their tech before you can even contribute (let alone "steal") help a lot.