The incompatibility of open core and profit
bytesdataaction.substack.com
The incompatibility of open core and profit
1–10 of 98 posts
Re: The incompatibility of open core and profit
#2Interesting look at a tough problem (OSS business models). I'm not sure I buy the solutions, but it sure doesn't hurt to take another look at the issue.
Re: The incompatibility of open core and profit
#3By "Open Core" are they referring to "Open Source"?
Re: The incompatibility of open core and profit
#4By "Open Core" are they referring to "Open Source"?
The open-core model is a business model for the monetization of commercially produced open-source software. Coined by Andrew Lampitt in 2008,[1] the open-core model primarily involves offering a "core" or feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary software.[2][3]
From here -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model
Re: The incompatibility of open core and profit
#5One of the biggest pain points in monetization of open source is that the large companies such as Amazon and Microsoft are in a better position to provide support and cloud hosting for open source projects than even the original developer. That is because because it is open source, the big company is able to see exactly how the internals of the service work. However, the internals of the cloud service are still opaque to open source cloud hosting company. Thus the cloud company is in a better position to optimize and debug the open source product.
In addition, companies like having “one throat to choke”. It is a nightmare for business when different vendors all blame each other. If the service is hosted by the cloud company, there is one neck to choke since they own the entire experience.
In addition, good software engineering practices reduce the moat of the original open source company. APIs and documentation and tests for an open source project should allow an experience software developer who is unfamiliar with the project to quickly come up to speed. Thus, the large company can rapidly acquire expertise in the open source tool if they want to.
Paradoxically, these issues apply most to venture capital startups where there is an expectation of massive valuation and return on investment. A “lifestyle” business supporting open source software is very doable mainly because the returns, while large for the person, and not big enough to attract the large companies. An example of such a successful open source business is I think SQLite where, from Hwaci makes a decent amount of money supporting SQLite, but not enough to attract unwanted attention.
Re: The incompatibility of open core and profit
#6Sooo what is says is that Open Core goals are mostly to get your users hooked under pretense the software is "open source", while putting just enough features behind the proprietary part that you have no choice using it once your product grows ?
Re: The incompatibility of open core and profit
#7By "Open Core" are they referring to "Open Source"?
Open core is open source + proprietary add ons. Gitlab is probably the best example. There is an open source gitlab which you can use and host, but the commercial product you pay for has a whole lot of additional features which big orgs need
Re: The incompatibility of open core and profit
#8Sooo what is says is that Open Core goals are mostly to get your users hooked under pretense the software is "open source", while putting just enough features behind the proprietary part that you have no choice using it once your product grows ?
Yes, but that read is a bit cynical. I think it's totally reasonable to create some tool that any college student or tinkerer can use to get a cool idea off the ground, but also want to get paid when it's leveraged to significant financial success. Pure open source is nice, but in practice it means corporate sponsorship or ramen lifestyle, both of which, it seems to me, have worse downsides than the loss of ideological purity in small companies trying to make a living building great tech.
Re: The incompatibility of open core and profit
#9There is no incompatibility between Open Core and profit. There is an incompability between FOSS and profit but the motives of "Open Core" are transparent and always have been. It's always been a marketing scheme to entice people into using the full product once your business scales and I don't see the problem with wanting people to buy-in if they are using in at that scale.. I also think the "solutions" presented here are optimistic at best.
Re: The incompatibility of open core and profit
#10By "Open Core" are they referring to "Open Source"?
Among other problems, this article seems to be using a much broader definition of open core than everyone else. Business models like support or SaaS are not usually considered to be open core.