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Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good

plural.sh

11–20 of 49 posts

Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good

#11
As someone building something that's intended to be released as open-core, I disagree with this article. I've worked at and with B2B companies my entire life and specifically in that domain, there's a lot of "process-things" that are steamlined using a SaaS rather than by self-hosting. It's "much" easier to get a budget for a SaaS for $5 per user rather than have devops involved with setting up infra for a new service (and move around a hundred other priorities for them), and they'd happily say to have someone else send an invoice at end of the month for a service even if they can technically host it themselves with 90% of the core features.

Of course, there's other 'grey-pattern' techniques that open-core systems use (eg. the notorious https://sso.tax) that can also help build companies around but it's important to note that a small 10-100 person company has very different "app visibility/reporting/analytics" needs than a 1000 person corporate with multi-level hierarchies, and it's very much possible to build out a profitable company that builds a community with the 10-100 person startup via open source offerings that work perfectly for their use-cases while charging the companies that want something that "just works" for them for a lot of the advanced non-core stuff (and services).

Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good

#12
post #5

I 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.

Postgres is super easy to run with these days -- it works great in a container.

Clustering and replication isn't the easiest but that's mostly because it just hasn't been a focus of the postgres machine -- they're making changes that are a bit more fundamental and in my opinion pressing.

Most startups just need to scale a postgres server vertically, not horizontally.

Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good

#14
post #5

I 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.

Either I'm the guy setting up all the vulnerable Postgres installs or I'm just some kind of unknown Postgres savant.

Cany anybody help me out and mention some setup details a blissful idiot like myself might be neglecting in their postgres cluster-ups?

Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good

#15
A model that could align incentives better is putting the IP in a trust with the development company as a trust management corporation, with developers, managers, &c, functioning as trustees. Users buy in to the trust -- their license will be a kind of share -- and thus users are beneficiaries.

In order to make any use of the project, users also have to be trustees. This model allows restrictions on what they use it for, what they disclose, &c, because users must agree to certain terms as part of becoming trustees.

Because the development company is a trustee, their incentives are different from those of software companies that own IP: trustees have a fiduciary duty to act in the interests of beneficiaries (even though trust management companies can have their own shares and shareholders, they nevertheless have a fiduciary duty to the beneficiaries).

One of the benefits of open source is that it's possible to arrange for succession if a company stalls out. No one is breaking the law by continuing to develop on the basis of the old IP. Organizing the software as a trust with users as beneficiaries makes it relatively easy to manage succession, as well, since the beneficiaries are the ultimate owners of the property contained in the trust and have a power to appoint new trustees as well as remove old ones.

Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good

#16
I'm not sure the part about support contracts being healthier is correct. Doesn't selling support incentivise creating a product that's difficult to use or has reliability issues? I don't know if that happens in practice (and it is the model I would choose myself!) but there's definitely room for perverse incentives there too.

Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good

#17
post #6

There 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.

One example is global cross-repo search. When looking for substrings on KDE or GNOME's Gitlab, I often want to use the global search bar, but there is no free full-text search across all repositories hosted there, and I have to rely on code search tools external from the code hosting site's UI, like KDE's https://lxr.kde.org/.

Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good

#18
post #14
post #5

I 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.

Either I'm the guy setting up all the vulnerable Postgres installs or I'm just some kind of unknown Postgres savant. Cany anybody help me out and mention some setup details a blissful idiot like myself might be neglecting in their postgres cluster-ups?

How do you handle replication and failover?

The cluster of 3+ servers must remain consistent, available, and not lose committed transactions when a minority of servers (including the former master) fails.

Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good

#19
I got halfway through this before reading the line "Docker, Elastic, and MongoDB are great examples of succeeding with the hosted open-core SaaS" and realizing I have a fundamentally different idea of the meaning of "open-core" and perhaps also "success" from the author. I'm not sure I can agree with anything else stated in the article either...

Re: Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good

#20
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

While I appreciate one can do this, it doesn't mean it will happen, and doesn't really answer the OPs question head on.

Which is, does GitLab intentionally evaluate certain features to be behind the paywall to boost sales?

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