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Several months ago, after consulting with HN community (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9757243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9757243) what we can d

by ex3ndr 11y ago

Several months ago, after consulting with HN community (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9757243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9757243) what we can do with our startup, we open sourced our platform and now our team feels pretty well. But after months, we see that powerful companies just silently use our software to solve there's needs and making no contributions. We accept small contributions, but we can't count on them as platform is much bigger than contributions. We tried to write Wikipedia-like letter to ask for donations - doesn't work. Tried to make consulting - eats too much time. Now we releasing enterprise version (https://corp.actor.im https://corp.actor.im) and we decided not to open sources of it as it is almost impossible to earn money without pushing people to pay. And pushing can be performed only with limitations that is, actually, harming people in some cases. Does anyone know any other solution for this?

dman 11y ago
The model works if you rename your company to Red Hat :)
- baldfat 11y ago
  Yeah you can't use anything else that Red Hat uses like CentOS (which Red Hat saved) or use Fedora. Heck even Oracle rips off Red Hat and calls it Oracle Linux. I don't see your point.
  - dman 11y ago
    It was meant to be a joke on the sad state of affairs of business models around open source product companies.
mtgx 11y ago
Can't you just keep it open source for non-commercial use and require license fee for commercial use? Or is that too hard to enforce? (i.e. companies use the open source version for non-commercial use).
merb 11y ago
the problem is your product. there are way too many messaging platforms like actor. many of them are older. it's hard to compete in this market since you would need to be better than all the others. I mean the others are costing money at least some of them still they have mostly a bigger integration in the products the companies made. and thats why its impossible to earn money for you, you won't get enough users to stay rentable.
- ex3ndr 11y ago
  Yes, of course.

by ex3ndr 11y ago

dman 11y ago

The model works if you rename your company to Red Hat :)

baldfat 11y ago
Yeah you can't use anything else that Red Hat uses like CentOS (which Red Hat saved) or use Fedora. Heck even Oracle rips off Red Hat and calls it Oracle Linux. I don't see your point.
- dman 11y ago
  It was meant to be a joke on the sad state of affairs of business models around open source product companies.

mtgx 11y ago

Can't you just keep it open source for non-commercial use and require license fee for commercial use? Or is that too hard to enforce? (i.e. companies use the open source version for non-commercial use).

merb 11y ago

the problem is your product. there are way too many messaging platforms like actor. many of them are older. it's hard to compete in this market since you would need to be better than all the others. I mean the others are costing money at least some of them still they have mostly a bigger integration in the products the companies made. and thats why its impossible to earn money for you, you won't get enough users to stay rentable.

ex3ndr 11y ago
Yes, of course.