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I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch. CockroachDB has

I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch. CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it. Do people here have examples of companies that are taking innovative approaches to the licensing/OSS question?

pas 8y ago
Elastic? They basically build a lot of extra (and very useful) functionality outside elasticsearch and sell that.
- Xylakant 8y ago
  They still suffer from the same problem: AWS is selling it's own elasticsearch service. It comes with a set of severe restrictions and is way less capable than elastics own offering, but it's improving and I see it used more and more often.
  - jsiepkes 8y ago
    If Amazon doesn't want to pay for your product they are not going to. They will just (re)implement it themselves with a compatible API. Even if MongoDB was a proprietary product with an Oracle-style pricelist Amazon still would have done the same: Reimplement it with compatible API. Then again the reverse is also true. Just look at all the software providing an S3 compatible API.
    - zaat 8y ago
      Well, Google (or rather, the original Android) did that to Oracle with the Java API, and Oracle, being Oracle, sued.
BossingAround 8y ago
But why did Red Hat succeed then? (this is a genuine question, I'd have guessed IBM would re-package RH's products, and Oracle failed with their Unbreakable Linux)
- warmwaffles 8y ago
  I think it is because Red Hat sold support and training.
- newaccoutnas 8y ago
  I think RH's longevity meant that it was already in a stronger position. There was also the kernel build obfuscation that happened to supposedly twhart unbreakable linux from taking everything wholesale.
- scaryclam 8y ago
  Red Hat sell enterprise services and solutions. The Linux distro is more of a delivery mechanism than a core product itself. IBM could very easily repackage and sell Red Hat's offerings, though IBM can only do so much when it comes to supporting those offerings, as they are not in control of what Red Hat themselves do next. They could also, of course, take a similar approach and create their own, which to some extent they actually do. Red Hat did a smart thing and used their open source offerings to deliver business value outside of the product space. It's an approach that most other successful OSS companies seem to have have followed.
- matwood 8y ago
  To put it succinctly, Red Hat doesn't sell Linux, they sell expertise in Linux.
  - StriverGuy 8y ago
    Arguable this is what MongoDB, Inc. sells as well. A big part of their package for enterprise clients is optimization and consulting services.
    - 8y ago
orwin 8y ago
I don't know if it's innovative, but you can look at https://www.nexedi.com/ https://www.nexedi.com/. They are open source, you can find all their projects on their gitlab: https://lab.nexedi.com/nexedi https://lab.nexedi.com/nexedi. They are selling services and the fact that you have to understand a lot of their tech before you can even contribute (let alone "steal") help a lot.
olavgg 8y ago
I think Citus Data is doing something right, they have an alternative to AWS RDS and some additional features. It still runs on AWS, but I think everyone who has tried to run PostgreSQL RDS on AWS has seen how slow it can be. A consumer grade laptop can be 10x-100x more performant than a cheap T2 medium RDS instance. Managing your own PostgreSQL with HA and replication is a ton of work. And for many small to medium sized companies, using a hosted service makes sense. But open source has a problem today, there is a huge lack of contribution in some projects. The older the project is, the more it seems to struggle.
LogicX 8y ago
Timescale just recently released a new license to complement their open source offering: https://blog.timescale.com/how-we-are-building-an-open-source-business-a7701516a480 https://blog.timescale.com/how-we-are-building-an-open-sourc... Almost exclusively designed to deal with the issue described in the article, of preventing public clouds from running this as a service. They also published another article about how to make money as an open-source company: https://blog.timescale.com/how-open-source-software-makes-money-time-series-database-f3e4be409467 https://blog.timescale.com/how-open-source-software-makes-mo...
yesimahuman 8y ago
I'd like to think we're doing something new at Ionic, primarily because we're frontend rather than backend focused. One big part of our business now is licensing Native SDK connectors/libs. For example, secure authentication that utilizes biometric auth and keystore/keychain functionality. Those aren't open source but any serious enterprise needs that if they are building an app with the open source Ionic Framework, and our target developer has no interest in writing native code to do this themselves. This is also interesting because enterprises are actively wanting us to build, support, and license out key client-side functionality for their apps. That alignment of free for the community with addons that only make sense for the enterprise has worked well for us so far and I believe the frontend focus keeps us far enough away from the "hosted OSS" problem described here for Mongo.
jayd16 8y ago
Android is an interesting case. AOSP is open source, and the OS allows for services that you expect from a smart phone to take any implementation. Google keeps control by holding on to the best implementation of services, as well as controlling the ecosystem with developer services. Amazon has shown that Android is still an open platform but the work involved to overthrow Google would be a massive undertaking.

pas 8y ago

Elastic? They basically build a lot of extra (and very useful) functionality outside elasticsearch and sell that.

Xylakant 8y ago
They still suffer from the same problem: AWS is selling it's own elasticsearch service. It comes with a set of severe restrictions and is way less capable than elastics own offering, but it's improving and I see it used more and more often.
- jsiepkes 8y ago
  If Amazon doesn't want to pay for your product they are not going to. They will just (re)implement it themselves with a compatible API. Even if MongoDB was a proprietary product with an Oracle-style pricelist Amazon still would have done the same: Reimplement it with compatible API. Then again the reverse is also true. Just look at all the software providing an S3 compatible API.
  - zaat 8y ago
    Well, Google (or rather, the original Android) did that to Oracle with the Java API, and Oracle, being Oracle, sued.

BossingAround 8y ago

But why did Red Hat succeed then? (this is a genuine question, I'd have guessed IBM would re-package RH's products, and Oracle failed with their Unbreakable Linux)

warmwaffles 8y ago
I think it is because Red Hat sold support and training.
newaccoutnas 8y ago
I think RH's longevity meant that it was already in a stronger position. There was also the kernel build obfuscation that happened to supposedly twhart unbreakable linux from taking everything wholesale.
scaryclam 8y ago
Red Hat sell enterprise services and solutions. The Linux distro is more of a delivery mechanism than a core product itself. IBM could very easily repackage and sell Red Hat's offerings, though IBM can only do so much when it comes to supporting those offerings, as they are not in control of what Red Hat themselves do next. They could also, of course, take a similar approach and create their own, which to some extent they actually do. Red Hat did a smart thing and used their open source offerings to deliver business value outside of the product space. It's an approach that most other successful OSS companies seem to have have followed.
matwood 8y ago
To put it succinctly, Red Hat doesn't sell Linux, they sell expertise in Linux.
- StriverGuy 8y ago
  Arguable this is what MongoDB, Inc. sells as well. A big part of their package for enterprise clients is optimization and consulting services.
  - 8y ago

orwin 8y ago

I don't know if it's innovative, but you can look at https://www.nexedi.com/ https://www.nexedi.com/. They are open source, you can find all their projects on their gitlab: https://lab.nexedi.com/nexedi https://lab.nexedi.com/nexedi. They are selling services and the fact that you have to understand a lot of their tech before you can even contribute (let alone "steal") help a lot.

olavgg 8y ago

I think Citus Data is doing something right, they have an alternative to AWS RDS and some additional features. It still runs on AWS, but I think everyone who has tried to run PostgreSQL RDS on AWS has seen how slow it can be. A consumer grade laptop can be 10x-100x more performant than a cheap T2 medium RDS instance. Managing your own PostgreSQL with HA and replication is a ton of work. And for many small to medium sized companies, using a hosted service makes sense. But open source has a problem today, there is a huge lack of contribution in some projects. The older the project is, the more it seems to struggle.

LogicX 8y ago

Timescale just recently released a new license to complement their open source offering: https://blog.timescale.com/how-we-are-building-an-open-source-business-a7701516a480 https://blog.timescale.com/how-we-are-building-an-open-sourc... Almost exclusively designed to deal with the issue described in the article, of preventing public clouds from running this as a service. They also published another article about how to make money as an open-source company: https://blog.timescale.com/how-open-source-software-makes-money-time-series-database-f3e4be409467 https://blog.timescale.com/how-open-source-software-makes-mo...

yesimahuman 8y ago

I'd like to think we're doing something new at Ionic, primarily because we're frontend rather than backend focused. One big part of our business now is licensing Native SDK connectors/libs. For example, secure authentication that utilizes biometric auth and keystore/keychain functionality. Those aren't open source but any serious enterprise needs that if they are building an app with the open source Ionic Framework, and our target developer has no interest in writing native code to do this themselves. This is also interesting because enterprises are actively wanting us to build, support, and license out key client-side functionality for their apps. That alignment of free for the community with addons that only make sense for the enterprise has worked well for us so far and I believe the frontend focus keeps us far enough away from the "hosted OSS" problem described here for Mongo.

jayd16 8y ago

Android is an interesting case. AOSP is open source, and the OS allows for services that you expect from a smart phone to take any implementation. Google keeps control by holding on to the best implementation of services, as well as controlling the ecosystem with developer services. Amazon has shown that Android is still an open platform but the work involved to overthrow Google would be a massive undertaking.