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Death of an open-source business model

joemorrison.medium.com

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Re: Death of an open-source business model

#61

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

john_cogs wrote: post #35
abetusk wrote: post #4

Mapbox releases Mapbox GL JS v2 under a proprietary license whereas v1 (presumably) was under an "open core" business model. (Mapbox v1 and v2 are graphics card enhanced mapping libraries?). The author of the article's thesis is that this is "an end of an era" of Open Core business models (putting core technology under a free/libre licensing and charging for extra proprietary features). I'm very curious as to what ot…

I work at GitLab. Our Open Core business model is part of our 3 year strategy [1] and something I consider one of our key strengths. As a member of the Community Relations team, I may be a bit biased. :) We acknowledge the risk of "Fork and Commoditize" [2] on our list of biggest risks but believe that risk is reduced because we're application software instead of infrastructure software. 1 - https://about.gitlab.com/…

> believe that risk is reduced because we're application software instead of infrastructure software.

Why do you believe this? My project uses self-hosted gitlab (ancient version) and I frankly have a very hard time seeing it as anything other than infrastructure. Maybe we just don't push our use of gitlab a lot (to be fair, we don't push it at all).

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#62

Post by pletsch »

hannob wrote: post #36
joejoebags wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote it last night; I didn't have time to research every "open core" company I could think of to figure out a chronology of their licensing strategy. I decided to publish it based on a limited number of case studies to gin up discussion and hopefully learn from other people about counter-examples. Do you know of any?

Of course by mentioning any name here I risk that they might be a future candidate of closing down and you say "gotcha" :-) Not all of them are "open core" in the sense that they have a core product and proprietary extensions (some just opensource everything they make), but a number of relevant companies around FOSS products: Gitlab, MariaDB Corporation, Blindside Networks (Big Blue Button), Qt Company, Mattermost In…

Big Blue Button is outstanding for any educators looking for tools. Full disclosure that it was built at the school I attended, we had a lot of profs use it and it was by far my favourite way to do distance learning.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#63

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

This seems to me more like another case of "death of a business model caused by revenue maximization strategy". "Open-core" does not have "non-viable" or even "must-be-bait-and-switch" stamped all over it. But if the organization using it decides that its primary goal is revenue maximization (and/or significant growth), then it becomes much more questionable how it will fare.

But isn't that the goal of any business, I hear you cry? No, it certainly is not. There are thousands of small businesses even just in the USA that are happy to work within the limitations of their situation and initial desires.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#64

Post by Veen »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #63

This seems to me more like another case of "death of a business model caused by revenue maximization strategy". "Open-core" does not have "non-viable" or even "must-be-bait-and-switch" stamped all over it. But if the organization using it decides that its primary goal is revenue maximization (and/or significant growth), then it becomes much more questionable how it will fare. But isn't that the goal of any business,…

It's not necessarily the organization and its founders who have revenue maximization as a primary goal. The other factor is hundreds of millions of dollars of VC money, and VCs are definitely all about revenue maximization. MapBox has raised quarter of a billion.

The conundrum is how does a company develop software as complex as MapBox without relying on VC cash to get the ball rolling.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#65

Post by infinity0 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #23
infinity0 wrote: post #18

I wish there was a FOSS license with a clause along the lines of: - if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it. Ofc, they (FSF/OSI/DFSG) would have to relax their FOSS definition(s), but with more projects dying in this way hopefully more FOSS organisations will take heed and think about this. Ofc, the wording of the license has to be precise enough to avoid something like fobbing off the servers to…

> " if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it. " That would just be a proprietary license with source availability. It would also dry up any community contributions since contributors are generally not going to help a for-profit project without themselves getting paid.

Sure, the license would have to figure out how to share revenue with major contributors too.

> contributors are generally not going to help a for-profit project without themselves getting paid.

Contributors already contribute to for-profit open source projects without themselves getting paid. This license would make the situation strictly better for them.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#67

Post by infinity0 »

hannob wrote: post #27

I feel there's a few cases cited here to make a case that an entired business model is dying, but it doesn't look to me that this is an overall trend. You can't extrapolate from "5 projects didn't fare well with this, so it's not working". But there's more. I followed the MongoDB case a bit and it's not exactly how many make it sound like. MongoDB was doing fine as a company. It wasn't like they were unable to pay th…

I wish there was a FOSS license with a clause along the lines of:

- if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it.

Ofc, they (FSF/OSI/DFSG) would have to relax their FOSS definition(s), but with more projects dying in this way hopefully more FOSS organisations will take heed and think about this.

Ofc, the wording of the license has to be precise enough to avoid something like fobbing off the servers to technically be controlled by subsidiaries with 0 revenue.

Ofc, the license would have to figure out how to share revenue with major contributors too.

Contributors already contribute to for-profit open source projects without themselves getting paid, so this license would make the situation strictly better for them.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#68

Post by vngzs »

hannob wrote: post #36
joejoebags wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote it last night; I didn't have time to research every "open core" company I could think of to figure out a chronology of their licensing strategy. I decided to publish it based on a limited number of case studies to gin up discussion and hopefully learn from other people about counter-examples. Do you know of any?

Of course by mentioning any name here I risk that they might be a future candidate of closing down and you say "gotcha" :-) Not all of them are "open core" in the sense that they have a core product and proprietary extensions (some just opensource everything they make), but a number of relevant companies around FOSS products: Gitlab, MariaDB Corporation, Blindside Networks (Big Blue Button), Qt Company, Mattermost In…

I'll name some more, with the same disclaimer:

Confluent (Kafka), Redis Labs, Eucalyptus Systems Inc. (AWS clone, acquired by HP), Instructure (Canvas)

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#69

Post by ironmagma »

As much as I want open source software to be good, commercial software has the inherent advantage of having hierarchies and teams that are all powered by compensation. We could really use some kind of platform in the open source community built around (a) making it easy to fund projects, AND (b) making those projects organizable, with a team lead and contributors.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#70

Post by ignoramous »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #61
john_cogs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at GitLab. Our Open Core business model is part of our 3 year strategy [1] and something I consider one of our key strengths. As a member of the Community Relations team, I may be a bit biased. :) We acknowledge the risk of "Fork and Commoditize" [2] on our list of biggest risks but believe that risk is reduced because we're application software instead of infrastructure software. 1 - https://about.gitlab.com/…

> believe that risk is reduced because we're application software instead of infrastructure software. Why do you believe this? My project uses self-hosted gitlab (ancient version) and I frankly have a very hard time seeing it as anything other than infrastructure. Maybe we just don't push our use of gitlab a lot (to be fair, we don't push it at all).

> Why do you believe this?

GitLab's co-founder and CEO goes into the details in this talk: https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-sourc...

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