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Open core companies are not incentivized to make their projects good

plural.sh

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

#21

Post by pugio »

What about a commercial source but fully source-available product?

I'm currently building an app I hope will appeal to the HN crowd, and I was planning on making the full source available to all customers - this would be billed as a feature of the product.

I can't count the number of times I was happily using a closed source product only to find a bug or missing feature that I really wished I could just make a small tweak to add/fix. I didn't need the app to be open source or anything, I just wanted to be able to see what was running and make a small change myself. For many of these situations I would happily commit the patch back to the commercial product, just so that my experience would be nicer.

I want to be able to charge for and sell my app, but I would like all my users to be able to see exactly what's running under the hood, and be able to tweak and modify it for their own personal use. (I also plan on including an extensive public extension API. Extensions can also be open source of course.)

To me this seems like a fairly good sweet spot, as I really do need to charge to be able to support the development. I could even see committing to always keeping the source available to users, or to open source it if I ever stop commercial development of the product. I hope this appeals to folks here, because I can't see a better model that will support a single developer as I go.

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

#22

Post by gz5 »

There can be 100% user-facing feature parity with differences on:

+ SLA and support models (including updates, delivery, integration, etc)

+ Hosted vs. self-hosted

+ Procurement models

+ Compliance models

+ Legal, licensing, IP models

The last 3 may be most applicable in the enterprise part of the market, but can be critical there. Enterprise also often has 'features' which are driven by admin, ops, security, procurement and compliance teams. These 'features' may make sense to limit to the SaaS, partially to keep the FOSS clean, and don't conflict with a mission of user-facing feature equivalence between FOSS and SaaS.

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

#23

Post by ksec »

pugio wrote: post #21

What about a commercial source but fully source-available product? I'm currently building an app I hope will appeal to the HN crowd, and I was planning on making the full source available to all customers - this would be billed as a feature of the product. I can't count the number of times I was happily using a closed source product only to find a bug or missing feature that I really wished I could just make a small…

Which is like the Unreal Engine Model. Unfortunately this "Share Source" model hasn't caught on and lacks a widely accepted license.

I hope I am wrong and do wish you to succeed. But Not Strictly Open Source doesn't appeal much to HN crowd.

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

#24

Post by com »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #18
aliqot wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve had good experiences with logical replication and pg_auto_failover. The cool thing is that the libpq-based clients do some of the work during failovers. You’ll need three nodes though.

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

#25

Post by pessimizer »

> One may suggest: “If things are running perfectly, won’t customers reduce their required engagement or remove the support plan?” Generally, no. The cost of keeping experts around is usually far lower than a SaaS bill and new features will always need to be built.

I don't understand this assertion. One of the main perverse incentives affecting open core software quality is that the more help people need with the software, the more they'll value support. This article about open core incentives regarding software quality just handwaves this away.

The other demotivator is that having your (OSS) open core be good means that if you make any user-hostile business-motivated demands, somebody will simply fork you and take over your business.

The best defense against the latter is the GPL. Make your competition share all of their work while you don't have to. And ask yourself: if your strategy is going to be to leverage an OSS application to sell proprietary accessories, why be bitchy about copyleft? It's the best of both worlds - open enough that you're contributing to the commons, and restrictive enough that you (as the copyright holder) can still play games with licensing keys and obfuscation to accomplish business objectives. If the community forks your GPL core and publicly builds on it better than you do behind closed doors, it means that you've been outcompeted fair and square.

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

#28

Post by whartung »

pugio wrote: post #21

What about a commercial source but fully source-available product? I'm currently building an app I hope will appeal to the HN crowd, and I was planning on making the full source available to all customers - this would be billed as a feature of the product. I can't count the number of times I was happily using a closed source product only to find a bug or missing feature that I really wished I could just make a small…

It's one thing to be able to see what's going on under the hood. It's another being able to change what's going on under the hood. And it's a third thing not having that change you just made get stomped on, or interfere with the next great release of the product.

Even potentially more difficult is getting your change accepted by the software vendor to where it's now incorporated in to the production product.

I mean, this is nothing new, this happens with open source projects all the time, but it can be a difference in scope depending on the level that your company actually relies on some product for their operations.

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

#29

Post by tremon »

pessimizer wrote: post #25

> One may suggest: “If things are running perfectly, won’t customers reduce their required engagement or remove the support plan?” Generally, no. The cost of keeping experts around is usually far lower than a SaaS bill and new features will always need to be built. I don't understand this assertion. One of the main perverse incentives affecting open core software quality is that the more help people need with the sof…

Make your competition share all of their work while you don't have to.

Can't your competitor then just release their contributions as AGPL? Of course, you're free not to accept their contributions, but under the AGPL you can no longer merge their contributions back into your commercial product without having to share all of your work too.

(Yes, usual caveats about the scope of "the work" apply. But that applies just as much to your competitors as to you)

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