The life and death of open source companies

sounds like a very defeatist attitude.

for good software consulting revenue is not a function of how many bugs/bad UX there are- you consult on setup, integration,maintenance,etc. If the software improves the need for this does not disappear.

If you communicate clearly what the proprietary parts of the software are, it also shouldnt be an issue. If someone wants to implement and especially maintain and test them themselves without paying, they are free to fork and do that.

All these have not happened in 20 years though. Not a single contribution have been rejected because of these reasons.

Of course I would indeed expect a contribution that:

- tries to disable our licensing mechanism in our paid extensions

- tries to copy our paid extension code to our product or to a community extension

To be rejected upstream. But isn't it fair game? They can still fork the code and go start something on their own, it's one of the important features of open source. One can start a new extension repository and convince users to add it to their config, or even fork the product and provide this by default. But this is work, they'll have to maintain this, and will probably depend on us, in the end.

Most likely, we would welcome significant contributions and QoL improvements, we are only so many people for that much work to do, improvements would allow us to focus on something else. If someone outside the company is willing to maintain some feature that we currently offer for a price, it probably actually grow / improve the ecosystem and it would probably be welcomed, letting us focus on other things our customers want. People maintaining extensions or feature for our product would likely be friends. Of course you can't just dump some code and go away, that's not sustainable.

> Plus, these kinds of businesses generally only scale to mom and pop store or maybe 100 consultants.

That may be true. My company reached 60 people this year. Nextcloud is around 100. But not everyone wants to become too big. There are a lot of advantages in staying small-ish. For the CEO, a big company is also not the same fun as a 50 people company.

Why is Bamboo able to make 3D printers at 1/3 of the price?

Most consumers are price sensitive instead of closed/open source sensitive.

If Meka was cheaper, they would win.

"Source available; delayed open-source release" or "source available; delayed open source" is what I would call this kind of license. It accurately describes both the present and the future legal status of the code. I wouldn't use "delayed open source" on its own because it could be misleading. Since it omits the current status, people may believe "delayed open source" software is some kind of open source already.

I think I understand why you strongly disagree with the label. Those who call your license "source available" without qualifiers are, from your perspective, committing the noncentral fallacy (https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-non...). While your license is technically "source available" according to the Wikipedia definition, it is not a typical example of a "source available" license, which usually doesn't grant additional freedoms over time and doesn't become free-as-in-freedom. I don't really see a fix. The difference between "technically category X" and "typical of category X" is an eternal universal source of bitter conflict. The best advice I can give to people embroiled in one is to care less about "technically category X" if at all possible.

Besides inventing a new label and adding a qualifier like "delayed open source", one admittedly unlikely thing licenses like FSL could try is to "reclaim" "source-available". It doesn't have to mean "a megacorp lets you peek at the code if you agree to not use it for anything interesting". The typical expectations of a source-available license could shift to less onerous and less restrictive.

>You could build your own but it would have no economical value. Because it is a commodity. There are countless examples like this.

Not because it's a commodity but because it is free. Free because Microsoft or Oracle or an enthusiastic Ruby developer wrote the code once and then it was done. We can then go on and build our layers on top of it without raising a purchase requisition or getting our credit card out.

The reason this can happen is because the marginal cost of software is so low. Microsoft put the work on to create their standard library on the basis that it helped them sell more SQL Servers or Windows operating systems and we all get the benefits because each additional user costs them almost nothing.

At first sight this looks like a benefit to us all but there are downsides as well. If I wanted to offer a better date and time library for .Net then I would find it difficult to compete because the alternative is free even though it isn't perfect.

If you look at hardware it is a different story. I could buy a Dell laptop and it would run exactly the same software as my Lenovo (bar drivers). This looks much more like a commodified product to me.