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All my new code will be closed-source from now on

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Re: All my new code will be closed-source from now on

#11

Post by vidarh »

moltar wrote: post #3

This is a foreign position to me. I open sourced my code not to make money but because I saw that others can benefit from it. I never made money from open source. If I did my mental model would be that these are charitable donations, not an income stream I can rely on.

I've "made money" from my relatively limited open source contributions primarily by being moved straight past coding stages when interviewing a few times. That's enough payoff for me. Other than that it's mostly a "why not?"

There are some - very limited - pieces of code I keep private relating to my consulting business, but I've seen more downside in keeping code private over the years than not. E.g. lots of code I've written that are locked up in companies that no longer use it that I wish I could still use.

The proportion of code I have that would create a moat that makes it worth holding the code back is miniscule.

Re: All my new code will be closed-source from now on

#13

Post by ossa-ma »

Ekaros wrote: post #7

Monetizing open source never made sense for me. Mostly because I operate from selfish viewpoint. Why would I pay for something that is provided for free? It is starting to seem like I was right. You have to fund it from selling a product. Or be one of the few that are valuable enough to be paid for running it. But those are exceedingly rare in total population and don't make scalable business model.

Like he said a lot of OSS works on tiered features, most is free, premium at a premium.

But the main issue is that doesn't work anymore if LLMs have been trained entirely on the free and can generate the premium with ease.

Re: All my new code will be closed-source from now on

#14

Post by CubsFan1060 »

Ekaros wrote: post #7

Monetizing open source never made sense for me. Mostly because I operate from selfish viewpoint. Why would I pay for something that is provided for free? It is starting to seem like I was right. You have to fund it from selling a product. Or be one of the few that are valuable enough to be paid for running it. But those are exceedingly rare in total population and don't make scalable business model.

It's almost always locking some features behind subscription.

Obviously, SSO is the best choice for most deployments. Enterprises (who will probably pay the most) will require SSO.

Open Source is the "free taste". Everyone knows, uses, and likes Grafana. When your company is looking for something, you'll recommend it because you're familiar with it. Your company will want things like SCIM or similar, and pay them for it.

It's harder for products that are trying to sell to smaller companies/individuals, but it still applies.

Re: All my new code will be closed-source from now on

#15

Post by CubsFan1060 »

ossa-ma wrote: post #13
Ekaros wrote: post #7

Monetizing open source never made sense for me. Mostly because I operate from selfish viewpoint. Why would I pay for something that is provided for free? It is starting to seem like I was right. You have to fund it from selling a product. Or be one of the few that are valuable enough to be paid for running it. But those are exceedingly rare in total population and don't make scalable business model.

Like he said a lot of OSS works on tiered features, most is free, premium at a premium. But the main issue is that doesn't work anymore if LLMs have been trained entirely on the free and can generate the premium with ease.

Part of me says that that could be handled with licenses, though for that to work the code probably no longer qualifies as open source either.

Also, I'd guess, the sort of people who are comfortable with asking an LLM to build the premium features are, uh, morally flexible enough to not care about licenses in the first place.

Re: All my new code will be closed-source from now on

#16

Post by theturtletalks »

I feel the same way as this person, but I’m leaning even more into open-source. I’m building an open-source SaaS for every vertical and even though it’s open-source, we offer cloud hosting, yet most users deploy on their servers. Our cloud hosting is just one source of monetization, our main monetization is a decentralized marketplace around these SaaS.

My point is, monetizing open-source is really hard. Tailwind was giving bricks away for free while selling you a house. Given enough time, people used those bricks to build houses and gave them away for free.

Re: All my new code will be closed-source from now on

#17

Post by coldpie »

Ekaros wrote: post #7

Monetizing open source never made sense for me. Mostly because I operate from selfish viewpoint. Why would I pay for something that is provided for free? It is starting to seem like I was right. You have to fund it from selling a product. Or be one of the few that are valuable enough to be paid for running it. But those are exceedingly rare in total population and don't make scalable business model.

> You have to fund it from selling a product.

Well, no. Most people in the world get paid for doing a thing. I pay someone $X and they do Y for me and then I have the Y that I wanted done.

This can work for software too. Someone pays me to develop software that does something useful for them, and then they have the thing they wanted. For example if Wine is missing a feature someone can pay me to implement it, and then everyone involved is happy.

I agree it's a more challenging business model, but it does work.

Re: All my new code will be closed-source from now on

#18

Post by vidarh »

rhplus wrote: post #6

> My prediction: a new marketplace emerges, built for agents… Libraries become APIs with meters. So… SaaS and how every cloud provider already monetizes open-source code?

It also seems like a weird prediction when agents make reproducing the API from a spec easier and easier. If an API is accessible, you can point your coding agent at it to refine a spec and local test suite.

You'd expect libraries-as-API (libraries that's previously be offered in code form but where people try to limit code access by offering it only as an API, as opposed to SaaS's where the API provided access to a larger system, gatekept data, or running infrastructure) to get incredibly hard to monetize too, unless they're extremely complex.

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