Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good
1–10 of 49 posts
Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good
#2"However, open-source companies need to accept that the majority of their big deals and logos come from support contracts, not cloud spending"
Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good
#3they are incentivized to make them somewhat complex
Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good
#4they are incentivized to make them somewhat complex
Let's make something so complex no one really knows how to use it and then we can sell support on top of that
Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good
#5I haven't investigated how true this is, but I've long suspected the reason that PostgreSQL remains relatively difficult to install, configure, replicate, and cluster is that most of the development is done by companies who sell paid solutions that make it easy to install, configure, replicate, and/or cluster.
Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good
#6There are different types of features you can monetize with open core. The article talks about monetizing features that allow you to run it as a SaaS and the problems with that. At GitLab we opted to make those open: "The open source codebase will have all the features that are essential to running a large 'forge' with public and private repositories" https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/#promises Instead we monetize features that managers and executives care more about https://about.gitlab.com/company/pricing/#buyer-based-open-c... This prevents the perverse incentives mentioned in the article.
Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good
#7There are different types of features you can monetize with open core. The article talks about monetizing features that allow you to run it as a SaaS and the problems with that. At GitLab we opted to make those open: "The open source codebase will have all the features that are essential to running a large 'forge' with public and private repositories" https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/#promises Instead we…
There a lots of features in gitlab that are closed source that I, as small, one man shop, would like to have. I do think gitlab does a much better job of balancing proprietary versus open source features than most open core products, but the incentive still seems to be there to keep useful features back.
Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good
#8I haven't investigated how true this is, but I've long suspected the reason that PostgreSQL remains relatively difficult to install, configure, replicate, and cluster is that most of the development is done by companies who sell paid solutions that make it easy to install, configure, replicate, and/or cluster.
Some of those solutions are themselves open source. Perhaps I am being too generous, but I tend to think in this case it is more that there are many possible approaches to these things and the postgres community simply does not want to bless any one solution just yet.
Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good
#9There are different types of features you can monetize with open core. The article talks about monetizing features that allow you to run it as a SaaS and the problems with that. At GitLab we opted to make those open: "The open source codebase will have all the features that are essential to running a large 'forge' with public and private repositories" https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/#promises Instead we…
There a lots of features in gitlab that are closed source that I, as small, one man shop, would like to have. I do think gitlab does a much better job of balancing proprietary versus open source features than most open core products, but the incentive still seems to be there to keep useful features back.
GitLab team member here.
You can make suggestions to move features between tiers, i.e. moving a paid feature to the free tier, by opening an issue following https://about.gitlab.com/company/pricing/#changing-tiers-and...
Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good
#10There are different types of features you can monetize with open core. The article talks about monetizing features that allow you to run it as a SaaS and the problems with that. At GitLab we opted to make those open: "The open source codebase will have all the features that are essential to running a large 'forge' with public and private repositories" https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/#promises Instead we…
Are you then incentivized to work on managerial features rather than core product features? The disincentive comes from the fact that profits aren’t tied to the quality of the product.