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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

#81

Post by smarx007 »

pulse7 wrote: post #77
ironmagma wrote: post #69

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.

"(a) making it easy to fund projects" I don't know how it is in the US, but in EU you need a regular invoice for a business expense. So if a company wants to support an open-source project today, they need an invoice from the authors. Now try to get this from the author of your favorite GitHub open-source library... And for large corporations you need to get a quote / an offer so that a business decision may be made…

Pretty sure https://www.tidelift.com/ can invoice you.

Upd: GH has announced they can do too https://github.blog/2020-12-08-new-from-universe-2020-dark-m... "Starting today, investing in open source is as easy as just adding it to your GitHub bill!"

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#82

Post by nrvn »

pulse7 wrote: post #77
ironmagma wrote: post #69

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.

"(a) making it easy to fund projects" I don't know how it is in the US, but in EU you need a regular invoice for a business expense. So if a company wants to support an open-source project today, they need an invoice from the authors. Now try to get this from the author of your favorite GitHub open-source library... And for large corporations you need to get a quote / an offer so that a business decision may be made…

What about non-profit organizations, donations, charity funds? I doubt that there is absolutely no way for EU based companies and people to support open source projects snd teams behind them

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#83

Post by joejoebags »

Veen wrote: post #64
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.

Great point. Are there any bootstrapped $1B+ open core companies? There are a surprising number of proprietary ones (e.g. Esri, Mailchimp, etc.)

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#85

Post by john_cogs »

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).

The link I shared in my last comment goes into detail on how we view the differences between application vs infrastructure.

To your point on your usage - it's certainly possible that folks use GitLab in different ways and that our thesis does not apply to each use case.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#86

Post by ironmagma »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #72
ironmagma wrote: post #69

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.

Big questions: Who pays for credit processing, auditing etc.? One platform or many? Are the managing people allowed to make a profit? How do you ensure that important but boring projects get money as well? See the ubuntu software store, elementary OS, patreon/liberapay, .... Edit: Also "commercial" is the wrong word. You mean proprietary. You are very much encouraged to sell free software https://www.gnu.org/philosop…

If you sell the software, you could in theory form a team with hired individuals, etc. It’s not proprietary software that has some advantage; the act of keeping the source proprietary does nothing to help with logistics of development, that’s what charging money does.

As for the questions, I don’t have the solution, I am limited to knowing what the problems are unfortunately.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#87

Post by linuxhansl »

IMHO "open core" is not a good idea in the first place.

Open source is about an open community, open contributions, the multiplier you get from contributions from multiple companies. That way open source is a win-win. Companies benefit from each other's contributions.

It's _not_ about just showing the code or a free-for-all.

Once you have free and non-free tiers it's already broken. The incentives no longer align.

I'm being paid in part to work on the open source projects that we utilize for our service(s). Some of those we started, some of those we're contributing to, but we _own_ none of them. We handed them off to external entities (Apache and others) for governance and we actively encourage others to participate.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#88

Post by evanelias »

paulgb wrote: post #58
joejoebags wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, those are great examples. I've considered writing about Mattermost before, as I think it's a fascinating pattern that I haven't seen much elsewhere. Attack an existing, high-profile app by cloning it in the open but then additionally build a for-profit company around the clone. Truly a galaxy brain strategy.

I’ve been interested in this pattern as well. I’d contend that GitLab is another good example, and even argue that Automattic is too (IIRC Movable Type was already a successful proprietary blogging platform when WordPress came along) Which is all to say, if you write that post, I for one will read it :)

I don't think Automattic really fits the same pattern. Although Movable Type was one of the earliest and most successful source-available blogging platforms, there were a bunch of others soon after. They all had similarities in functionality, by nature of being blogging software, but they weren't exactly "clones". WordPress was actually a fork of another early blogging software, b2/cafelog.

When Six Apart made Movable Type's license more restrictive in 2004, a portion of the userbase jumped over to WordPress. Another thing in WP's favor was ease of hosting, due to being written in PHP, vs Movable Type's Perl. This all led to a lot of momentum for WP; Automattic was founded after that, in 2005.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#89

Post by john_cogs »

joejoebags wrote: post #39
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/…

Hi John--thanks for sharing these links. I do wonder if there is a fundamental difference between applications and infrastructure. Maybe it's the fact that applications tend to involve a greater share of non-engineering users (and therefore a greater reliance on someone else to host and manage the service)? Food for thought. GitLab is a great company, and I've read a lot of your strategy documents; it's a wonder you…

Thanks! That is great to hear.

We detail the differences between infrastructure and applications in link #2 in my previous comment. If you have any suggestions on how we can improve that section, I'd encourage you to create a MR to update the page. Just click the "Edit in Web IDE" link at the bottom to get started. :)

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#90

Post by ironmagma »

hpoe wrote: post #71
ironmagma wrote: post #69

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.

Counterpoint to that, all the tools I use most often and am most delighted by are published under a GPL or other FOSS license (Bash, Linux, Emacs, Firefox, Inkscape, etc) whereas the ones I am most constantly frustrated by, angry at, and find the most fault with are closed source proprietary company developed (Anything that starts with MS, VMWare Fusion, etc)

Firefox is developed by a company with hierarchies. Those other ones have the advantage of being very old and lots of time to iterate on them. Open source produces lots of gems, the problem is that it is very slow moving and IMO the effectiveness is cut in 10 by duplication of effort and lack of coordination. For every successful open source project, there are about 20 stubs and 5-10 less successful open source programs that do basically the same thing.
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