4 ms·

Well that depends. You can make money from open source. It more comes down to HOW which is rather than licensing code or subscription licenses BECAUSE the softw

Well that depends. You can make money from open source. It more comes down to HOW which is rather than licensing code or subscription licenses BECAUSE the software is closed. I agree at what you're getting at though.

lmeyerov 11y ago
Most of these companies are a freemium variant of open source. You get a bit free, and then pay for proprietary bits, e.g., admin tools and not getting hacked. This has been a big question for our company. Ultimately, one of our viewpoints has been that the current breed of open source companies, especially with VC pressure, struggle to align with the community after a couple years and reality sets in.
- agibsonccc 11y ago
  Right. We're open core ourselves. In our case the algorithms which researchers can benefit from aren't the same as what the businesses pay for (GUIs, integrations,support,..) which allows us to serve both fairly well.
  - lmeyerov 11y ago
    So let's play this out: Community user: this is awesome, let me add this bugfix Company: bugfix tweaked/improved & in mainline. Come speak at our conference! Community user: cool. Now here's this admin tool. Company: uh,no,sorry,please keep that out of the main repos. Community user: but admin is pretty central... When the center of the community actively dissuades core contributions, which is what we see, the alignment isn't working.
    - agibsonccc 11y ago
      Right. I'm talking about for our particular industry. This definitely isn't true of all.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      This is a worry that's mentioned in any article of business models. Do you know if anyone has collected actual data on how often a community version got parity with enterprise edition and significantly burned the sales? It's a good hypothesis but I'm not sure it happens often in practice. Most companies I found that had a premium model still have a premium model. Mine wasn't a large sample, though.

lmeyerov 11y ago

Most of these companies are a freemium variant of open source. You get a bit free, and then pay for proprietary bits, e.g., admin tools and not getting hacked. This has been a big question for our company. Ultimately, one of our viewpoints has been that the current breed of open source companies, especially with VC pressure, struggle to align with the community after a couple years and reality sets in.

agibsonccc 11y ago
Right. We're open core ourselves. In our case the algorithms which researchers can benefit from aren't the same as what the businesses pay for (GUIs, integrations,support,..) which allows us to serve both fairly well.
- lmeyerov 11y ago
  So let's play this out: Community user: this is awesome, let me add this bugfix Company: bugfix tweaked/improved & in mainline. Come speak at our conference! Community user: cool. Now here's this admin tool. Company: uh,no,sorry,please keep that out of the main repos. Community user: but admin is pretty central... When the center of the community actively dissuades core contributions, which is what we see, the alignment isn't working.
  - agibsonccc 11y ago
    Right. I'm talking about for our particular industry. This definitely isn't true of all.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    This is a worry that's mentioned in any article of business models. Do you know if anyone has collected actual data on how often a community version got parity with enterprise edition and significantly burned the sales? It's a good hypothesis but I'm not sure it happens often in practice. Most companies I found that had a premium model still have a premium model. Mine wasn't a large sample, though.