Death of an open-source business model

Big questions: Who pays for credit processing, auditing etc.? One platform or many? Are the managing people allowed to make a profit? How do you ensure that important but boring projects get money as well?

See the ubuntu software store, elementary OS, patreon/liberapay, ....

Edit: Also "commercial" is the wrong word. You mean proprietary. You are very much encouraged to sell free software https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

2020 strike again!

Seriously though, this article makes some assumptions I’m not sure about. One of them is that Mapbox’s move will be successful. I’m not sure it will be, most users of Mapbox probably won’t upgrade to the new version or will upgrade to whatever fork becomes most popular. In the meantime this is going to make people a lot warier of using them as a tile server and give impetus to their competitors in that market space. It’s quite possible they’ll start to see declining revenues pretty soon.

The success of their strategy is tied to the greatly expanded 3D capabilities of version two. It’s really cool and the demos are super sexy but for the vast majority of use cases 2D maps are a better fit. Given the distrust they’ve generated and the massive increase in licensing cost attached to their new model for many customers, there are now some extremely compelling reasons for customers to drop them.

One thing I recently stumbled upon that struck me was Bryan Cantrill's writeup at http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts... and https://sfosc.org/docs that was linked from that blog post.

Quick takeaways about open source business models:

- Dual licensing: Well, poison. Who's want to sign away their copyrights so that some company can make a buck? It's essentially proprietary software that also happens to be available open source under some as-tedious-as-possible licensing terms.

- Open core: Essentially proprietary software with an open source loss leader. Or for the supermarket chain variant of this business model: "We're opening a new supermarket! Free plastic buckets to the first 1000 customers", causing hours-long queues of people that really want a $2 plastic bucket for free. And as we've seen, it's not much of a protection against big cloud providers with armies of programmers that can easily recreate whatever proprietary juice you have added on top, adapted to their particular environment.

- Public goods: Like Linux Foundation projects like the Linux kernel or Kubernetes. Can work, but is not the direct core value of any of the companies participating. Similarly, a company in some other industry may share some code as open source in order to reduce the maintenance burden.

- Free software product: The flag bearer being Redhat. Code itself may all be open source, but a company call sell a particular version of it with support, training etc. Might not get the growth numbers and scale that gets VC's excited (as can be seen in the blog post the parent linked to), but can be sustainable.

My interpretation is the opposite. MongoDB is clearly successful - they are a public company worth 16 billion dollars. And they proving the success of the open core business model.

For 99% of use cases, MongoDB is open source. You can see the code, you can make modifications, you can use it for free in your business, you can share your changes with others, you can integrate it into your products and services. Yeah, you can't use it if you're working at AWS, but for most people it's just fine.

For founders creating new open source companies, it's a great strategy to go the route of MongoDB. Start off open source and sell services. If you run into big enough problems with direct competitors using your own software, you can modify the license to exclude them.

This is far better than the status quo in, say, 2010, when the conventional wisdom was that if you're providing a service it shouldn't involve any open source at all.

I've been thinking about this in my spare time for a while, under the working title "General Magic License"+. I think it's a good way (the only way) to reason about the whole "who pays for open source development?" problem. If you can define the terms of that license, and figure out how to get licensors to follow the terms, and copyright owners to license their code under it, then . Also it may be possible to prove the converse -- that it's impossible to define such a license. Then we can all get back to work on proprietary software, or at least know we're not going to get paid.

+Yes, I know.