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When 'open core' projects reject contributions for competing with the EE

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Re: When 'open core' projects reject contributions for competing with the EE

#51

Post by pm90 »

A lot of the comments here are along the lines of “this is fine. They should be able to make money to survive. Stop complaining or forkit. This is what open core is”.

IMO I don’t think this is what open core is. Open Core should mean that, if a user is not happy with a commercial offering, they are able to roll their own. Perhaps it would take them a bit of time operationally to do this. Maybe they need to spin up their own infra (eg cloud VMs, cloud database etc) but this should be possible for them to do this within a reasonable amount of time.

I think the change being rejected here is fundamental to the operation of this tool. Without SAML auth, you simply cannot deploy it yourself for your internal users.

I am willing and open to other views on this. But I am not convinced that project owners should be allowed to call their project open core without having some reasonable burden to allow the software to be self hosted.

Re: When 'open core' projects reject contributions for competing with the EE

#52

Post by prepend »

bmitc wrote: post #41
hannob wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without putting blame on anyone, this does show a fundamental issue with the open core model. It is built on the premise that your "open" product will not be as good as possible, so you can still have the higher priced "enterprise" product. I think it's fair to point that out. Usually, you expect that developers want to create software that is "as good as possible". They may have a different idea what exactly "good"…

This happens in open source projects, too, often for even more subjective reasons.

But with open source projects the community has the option to fork and carry on the code as the community wishes.

With licenses where a company owns and limits the IP, the community is stuck and can just stop using the project.

I think that’s a big difference.

Re: When 'open core' projects reject contributions for competing with the EE

#54

Post by [deleted] »

kuschku wrote: post #36
pydry wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>show a fundamental issue with the open core model The alternative is the code doesnt exist. >Usually, you expect that developers When developers give away software for free I have no expections of them. If they fix a bug I consider that a favor not an obligation on their part. There is a culture of entitlement surrounding open source which drives "expectations" from people who give stuff away for free and it's madde…

The only one giving stuff away for free is the author of the PR. And yet, you're calling that person entitled.

[deleted]

Re: When 'open core' projects reject contributions for competing with the EE

#56

Post by prabhatsharma »

kuschku wrote: post #36
pydry wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>show a fundamental issue with the open core model The alternative is the code doesnt exist. >Usually, you expect that developers When developers give away software for free I have no expections of them. If they fix a bug I consider that a favor not an obligation on their part. There is a culture of entitlement surrounding open source which drives "expectations" from people who give stuff away for free and it's madde…

The only one giving stuff away for free is the author of the PR. And yet, you're calling that person entitled.

Author of the pr gave stuff for free. He showed no signs of entitlement. But he is not there only one who gave stuff for free. The open source project gave code for free that is 100 times bigger than the pr. Not acknowledging that is a problem.

Re: When 'open core' projects reject contributions for competing with the EE

#57

Post by travem »

kuschku wrote: post #36
pydry wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>show a fundamental issue with the open core model The alternative is the code doesnt exist. >Usually, you expect that developers When developers give away software for free I have no expections of them. If they fix a bug I consider that a favor not an obligation on their part. There is a culture of entitlement surrounding open source which drives "expectations" from people who give stuff away for free and it's madde…

The only one giving stuff away for free is the author of the PR. And yet, you're calling that person entitled.

They are obviously not the only one, developers worked on the original code and made it available under the MIT license. The author of the PR has the right to make the change and run it on their own system, they are also free to share that change to others. The project is free to reject that change for whatever reason.

Re: When 'open core' projects reject contributions for competing with the EE

#58

Post by prepend »

madeofpalk wrote: post #17
prepend wrote: post #7

One of the many reasons why I think “open core” is not so hot and users should choose to avoid them and prefer OSI-conformant open source licenses that give them options when the company does lame stuff like this-fork and continue on.

This project is MIT licensed. It is not source available, but is open source (if your definition of open source means OSI-conformant license). The author/community is welcome to exercise those options that MIT affords them, such as forking and launching a competing product.

Thanks, sorry I misunderstood and thought the license was open core. I should have checked the license instead of just reading through the issue and assuming based on the headline.

Re: When 'open core' projects reject contributions for competing with the EE

#59

Post by ericb »

kuschku wrote: post #33
urig wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disappointing that the maintainers need to make a living (or, godforbid, even a profit) and that users can't get everything for free? Nope.

"get" "for free"? Where do users expect to "get" something for free? In fact, users are offering something "for free".

A company went to the free weekly picnic and offered to chop-down the tree that provided the shade everyone was eating under "for free" so they could build themselves a picnic table, because they didn't feel like paying for a chair or settling for the free blanket.

Re: When 'open core' projects reject contributions for competing with the EE

#60

Post by mritchie712 »

prepend wrote: post #7

One of the many reasons why I think “open core” is not so hot and users should choose to avoid them and prefer OSI-conformant open source licenses that give them options when the company does lame stuff like this-fork and continue on.

for most b2b software (especially one with a UI / requires a good design, e.g. a CRM or BI), I prefer to just pay a reasonable subscription and get a good product in return. Most "open source alternatives" in these categories are a farce.
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