Problems With Open-Source Business Models

This is exactly how I feel as well. I am working on an open source to-do list + calendar (https://getartemis.app), source at (https://github.com/satvikpendem/Artemis), and I try to subscribe to the same philosophy as Sentry[1] and Ghost[2], two popular products that are also open source but do not avoid generating revenue because of that.

One must always strive to compete, whether it be through business model, or more often, product. You can release a good proprietary product, or similarly, a bad open source product; the quality of being open source does not necessarily add nor detract from the quality of the product itself. Sure, one can `git clone` the product, but due to the other factors in the business, the "soft skills" such as marketing, branding, sales and general business development, no one can reliably copy the company still generate substantial revenue [3].

This is not to say, however, that if your company is infrastructure such as a database, that no one will copy and monetize that better than you; they may, even in general usage of the product, but what is missing is the lack of vertical integration within the product. A database is just a part used in the whole of a new product, not the whole in and of itself. That is why if I desire to make substantial revenue from an open sourced product, I would make it a fully integrated product, just as any proprietary one, and that is what I am to do with Artemis.

[1] - https://github.com/getsentry/sentry [2] - https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost [3] - https://ghost.org/about/

However, I understand the point being made. It's essentially a tragedy of the commons argument. Because the companies that get the most value from open source are also often the ones with the greatest resources to give back to open source projects if they chose to, they have a moral obligation to do so. There's also a sentiment one often hears along the lines of: I'm fine with people using my work for free but I don't want them making money off it. (This is essentially the basis for Creative Commons' non-commercial variant).

So it's not so much that large companies are actively hurting the projects--though you could argue that hosted offerings compete with the projects themselves. But that they often don't help in anything like the proportion that they benefit.

It's not clear to me that Open Core has really failed. Case in point, Elastic just IPO'd for billions and has an open core. In their case they completely develop their project. Their community is something of a user community, and the contributor community is heavily Elastic managed.

Sure those in the contributor community might complain about how hard it is to contribute, but 99.9999% of the community is more in the 'user' end of the spectrum and appreciate the stability of having a single company's vision and backing

I'm not sure its in the spirit of open source, but that's not the question. The question is about effective business models.

(more fundamentally 'open core' can mean so many different models it may be becoming meaningless)

The project website is cool as well. Very nice with the images of the rack in the mobile version :)