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Death of an open-source business model

joemorrison.medium.com

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Re: Death of an open-source business model

#111

Post by julianmarq »

warpech wrote: post #96
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on HN's cheerleading when some projects abandon open source (for example the top comment of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488642 ), the overall trend may be the user base not caring about open source in the same way people cared 5-10 years ago

When we at Handsontable switched to a proprietary license, it wasn't met with much enthusiasm from the existing open source users. But it helped us to get better deals. We invested part of the proceeds in another open source project - HyperFormula. The ideology is still in our blood and we keep the open source circle of life running. But I am happy that this new open source project is not on a collision course with r…

> The ideology is still in our blood and we keep the open source circle of life running.

I'm curious about what exactly you mean by these two sentences. Particularly the second one.

Is this circle you speak of the one where a company announces an open source product and once the goodwill—that open source development gives it—ensures a number of contributors and early adopters, helping the project grow until the company thinks it's good enough to monetize, at such point they close it down and start charging everyone; then they start a new open source product with the extra money, rinse and repeat?

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#112

Post by ThePhysicist »

Open core makes sense if you can provide a "light" version of your product that is already useful, and most professional users of your free product will eventually get into a situation where the "pro" version will save them money or will have a feature they dearly need, so they upgrade.

I'm not familiar with Mapbox JS toolkit but maybe the problem was that the free version was too useful already, so only a few of the free users saw the need to upgrade? In that case I can understand why they put it under a commercial license, because providing free support for the project can be a burden.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#113

Post by mauricio »

I think the business model and the software license often get conflated like this. Once you release software with an open source license, users are free to do what they wish as long as it's within the bounds of the license.

Separately comes the business model. If a business intends on selling a hosted version of their product, as most open source database companies seem to want to do, that product needs to compete on its own merits. Can the business truly offer a better hosting experience on someone else's cloud than those cloud providers themselves?

I think maybe we conflate the two because we want everything. We want to create open source products that a community contributes to and supports but that only the originating company can monetize. It just doesn't work that way.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#114

Post by claytonjy »

leipert wrote: post #51
claytonjy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worry you're right, and while I think it's bad for what it signals about business model viability, I'm not sure it's bad for how I use GitLab. Do the couple dozen devs at my company really need an internally-hosted version, or should we just pay for the cloud offering and supply our own runners? Seems easy to frame as a wash.

Working at GitLab, but I want to focus on this part of your comment in general: > Do the couple dozen devs at my company really need an internally-hosted version? From personal experience and knowledge through friends: Everyone writes code. Universities, Governments, Governmental agencies, political parties, etc. A lot of them do not want to host in the cloud, especially in Germany, considering that the cloud (depend…

That's a great point. I'm in the US, so this isn't an issue for us in the same way, though I've heard fears of "we can't put code in the cloud, what if it gets out!".

My response is "what's your threat model?". For a small company, our only security advantage is being a small target; there's no way we're competing with the Gitlab.com team on security.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#115

Post by Privacy846 »

ironmagma wrote: post #69

As much as I want open source software to be good, commercial software has the inherent advantage of having hierarchies and teams that are all powered by compensation. We could really use some kind of platform in the open source community built around (a) making it easy to fund projects, AND (b) making those projects organizable, with a team lead and contributors.

If you think authority and hierarchy is the way to go then there’s nothing wrong with proprietary software (both the product and how it is produced).

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#116

Post by jayparth »

joejoebags wrote: post #32
hannob wrote: post #27

I feel there's a few cases cited here to make a case that an entired business model is dying, but it doesn't look to me that this is an overall trend. You can't extrapolate from "5 projects didn't fare well with this, so it's not working". But there's more. I followed the MongoDB case a bit and it's not exactly how many make it sound like. MongoDB was doing fine as a company. It wasn't like they were unable to pay th…

I wrote it last night; I didn't have time to research every "open core" company I could think of to figure out a chronology of their licensing strategy. I decided to publish it based on a limited number of case studies to gin up discussion and hopefully learn from other people about counter-examples. Do you know of any?

Literally tons within the data ecosystem. dbt, Great Expectations, Dagster, Seldon. The list goes on. My employer Tecton has an "open core" called Feast and we are doing great. Mattermost, PostHog also come to mind.

Databricks has shown that you don't need a crazy license to win. I disagree with this article from my personal experiences and my industry experience but I respect you writing it. The business model is clearly alive though. Those companies that I listed have raised 100-200M in the past year at high velocities.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#117

Post by julianmarq »

_puk wrote: post #107
_puk wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more than one licence that's open source. Is there a reason that a new style of licence that prevents the "fork and suffocate" approach of these large companies can't be ratified as fitting with core open source values? Being dogmatic about the definition of open source, and not allowing that to evolve over time, feels like hard times ahead.

And just to build on that thought. (IMO) The only people who really care about open source are us, the philanthropic builders of said software. If we shout down those in our community who question the status quo, by simply stating "it's not open source", then we lose those people. Given the hard stance we see on open source, it's very seldom that the reply to that is "but why can't it be". An analogy that springs to…

Nothing is stopping you from using your own source available license. Mongo did it, and they're doing okay.

It seems like you're arguing something different: You (general you) want the distinction and, more importantly, goodwill that the "open source" label gives you, but without actually having to fit the parameters of "open source".

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#118

Post by insertnickname »

infinity0 wrote: post #67
hannob wrote: post #27

I feel there's a few cases cited here to make a case that an entired business model is dying, but it doesn't look to me that this is an overall trend. You can't extrapolate from "5 projects didn't fare well with this, so it's not working". But there's more. I followed the MongoDB case a bit and it's not exactly how many make it sound like. MongoDB was doing fine as a company. It wasn't like they were unable to pay th…

I wish there was a FOSS license with a clause along the lines of: - if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it. Ofc, they (FSF/OSI/DFSG) would have to relax their FOSS definition(s), but with more projects dying in this way hopefully more FOSS organisations will take heed and think about this. Ofc, the wording of the license has to be precise enough to avoid something like fobbing off the servers to…

You can write such a license if you want (or hire a lawyer to write it), but it's not FOSS and it never will be. Why is it important to you that such a license is recognized as FOSS?

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#119

Post by coward8675309 »

It's not clear to me that open-source-as-a-business-model was ever vibrant enough that it makes sense to say it has now died. Open-source-as-a-funding-model was surely a thing, but turning open source into a source of consistent and growing free cash flow has been much more rare.

At my last start-up the first things to go out the window when we wanted to stop burning money were the commercial Aerospike and Nginx licenses. That was five years ago.

The most durable model for commercially-funded open source is as a stratagem for commoditizing someone's complement. If you want to stick it to Apple, fund Android. If you want to stick it to Oracle, fund PostgreSQL. If you want to stick it to Microsoft, fund LibreOffice. If you want to stick it to Sun -- er, Oracle -- fund Linux.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#120

Post by lacker »

julianmarq wrote: post #103
lacker wrote: post #78

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, y…

I'd replace mongo with redis in your comment. Redis truly is open core, but mongo no longer is. Now it's source available, and has been removed from the repos of many distros. Calling mongo open source now just dilutes what "open source" actually means. The organization even removed the submission of its license for approval by the OSI. It's source available, and it's up to each person to decide whether that's good o…

That’s true, but Redis and MongoDB are at different points in their growth. Redis is worth around 1 billion, and they are still private. I would not be surprised if Redis usage continues to grow, which attracts more competitors, and they eventually shift to a “99% open” model more similar to MongoDB.
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