4 ms·

I don't understand this line of thinking. The product is outstanding and likely will be, if it is not already, the lifeblood of Cognitect as a company (in conju

I don't understand this line of thinking. The product is outstanding and likely will be, if it is not already, the lifeblood of Cognitect as a company (in conjunction with their consulting services I'm sure). What is wrong with a company building a worthwhile product to sell? This is a community (Hacker News that is) that should be in full support of companies building great products to sell!

erichmond 9y ago
I think it's fueled by a naive idea that paying for closed source software is inherently bad. Actually, it's not necessarily a naive idea, as this specific OP may have weighed the pros and cons and have decided that it's not worth the risk, but I do think there are very wrongheaded cargo cult ideas around this. We tend to gloss over the fact that when dealing with OSS: - Project maintainers can leave/change/stop supporting the software and the idea that "since it's OSS, I can just pick up the slack" sounds better in ones head, then it does in practice. - Even large projects (think Angular) can move in odd and unexpected directions, which in reality simulate a company "going out of business" for all intents and purposes. - OSS 'support' is great, until it's not. Meaning, if there are plenty of SO questions and answers, it's great, until your specific issue isn't addressed, at which point you're either looking to a third party to pay for support, or you're rolling your sleeves up and digging into a codebase you have no experience with outside of an external API level understanding. The dirty secret of large successful companies is that they actually pay for software, and the support of that software because they understand that time = money and vice versa. After using datomic in production, I'd welcome my competitor to use Postgres. I'd even push them to. It's a monstrous competitive advantage for me.
- zcam 9y ago
  There's more than just support to paid db services, look at neo4j, datastax, elastic, mongo and cockroachdb among others.
nine_k 9y ago
There is a "narrow niche" strategy, when you have a cool thing and only sell it to a small group of well-paying customers. There is an "open" strategy, when you offer the core part of your cool thing widely (cheaply / freemium model / for free), and profit from only e.g. 10% of the users that buy premium plans. You also have a fair chance to make your better way of doing things predominant, and put in the hands of a lot of people that won't pay you either way. The point is that when your cool thing may have a really wide adoption, with the "open" model you may have e.g. 50x the market share of the "narrow niche" model, and thus 5x the profit. Increased mindshare also helps further adoption. This, of course, depends on the adoption rate and paying customer rate.
0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
> I don't understand this line of thinking. Haven't you noticed the popularity contest going on with computing? If datomic isn't popular it will disappear.

erichmond 9y ago

I think it's fueled by a naive idea that paying for closed source software is inherently bad. Actually, it's not necessarily a naive idea, as this specific OP may have weighed the pros and cons and have decided that it's not worth the risk, but I do think there are very wrongheaded cargo cult ideas around this. We tend to gloss over the fact that when dealing with OSS: - Project maintainers can leave/change/stop supporting the software and the idea that "since it's OSS, I can just pick up the slack" sounds better in ones head, then it does in practice. - Even large projects (think Angular) can move in odd and unexpected directions, which in reality simulate a company "going out of business" for all intents and purposes. - OSS 'support' is great, until it's not. Meaning, if there are plenty of SO questions and answers, it's great, until your specific issue isn't addressed, at which point you're either looking to a third party to pay for support, or you're rolling your sleeves up and digging into a codebase you have no experience with outside of an external API level understanding. The dirty secret of large successful companies is that they actually pay for software, and the support of that software because they understand that time = money and vice versa. After using datomic in production, I'd welcome my competitor to use Postgres. I'd even push them to. It's a monstrous competitive advantage for me.

zcam 9y ago
There's more than just support to paid db services, look at neo4j, datastax, elastic, mongo and cockroachdb among others.

nine_k 9y ago

There is a "narrow niche" strategy, when you have a cool thing and only sell it to a small group of well-paying customers. There is an "open" strategy, when you offer the core part of your cool thing widely (cheaply / freemium model / for free), and profit from only e.g. 10% of the users that buy premium plans. You also have a fair chance to make your better way of doing things predominant, and put in the hands of a lot of people that won't pay you either way. The point is that when your cool thing may have a really wide adoption, with the "open" model you may have e.g. 50x the market share of the "narrow niche" model, and thus 5x the profit. Increased mindshare also helps further adoption. This, of course, depends on the adoption rate and paying customer rate.

0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago

> I don't understand this line of thinking. Haven't you noticed the popularity contest going on with computing? If datomic isn't popular it will disappear.