4 ms·

So how do you bootstrap your company? You choose closed source and you throw away early adopters - people are way, way less likely to try out closed source sof

So how do you bootstrap your company? You choose closed source and you throw away early adopters - people are way, way less likely to try out closed source software from what I've seen. They'll even resent you for it. You choose open source with a permissive license - you bootstrap, get users, and some larger company comes along and essentially takes it from you. You choose GPL3 or some less permissive license and no one will ever use your software. How do you see this working?

kristianc 7y ago
> So how do you bootstrap your company? Services
moreira 7y ago
You choose closed source and you get different early adopters. You don't get the same early adopters that try out every new open source project, and that's OK because you're not trying to run an open source project, you're trying to build a business. The people who would resent you for being closed source are just not your target market, and that's OK. Open source is a choice. You get a lot of early adopters, yes, but the project is also completely out of your control. There's nothing stopping anyone else from taking it, putting more resources into it, and stealing your thunder. If you're not happy with that idea, just don't make your code open source. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
- capkutay 7y ago
  There's also companies that create open source projects and go on to build highly differentiated value-add products on top of it. E.g. Databricks (owners of Apache Spark) who built a great SaaS product for managing data science pipelines. That product is so valuable it's almost as if they don't even need to monetize the spark project by itself. What I don't like is the companies that create some open source project for the hype, then charge for a 'management console' or some marginal add-on.
busterarm 7y ago
Elastic Cloud is far and away the best SaaS ElasticSearch offering. It's in every way a better product than the hosted AWS ElasticSearch service, which I find to be practically unusable. More importantly, I don't know anywhere that uses AWS ElasticSearch where ElasticSearch is a core component of someone's platform. The problem Elastic has is that their Cloud isn't remotely as good as self-hosting. Using their Cloud doesn't abstract away the domain knowledge needed to operate ElasticSearch at scale, so anyone who uses it and becomes competent will eventually self-host. If they can get better at abstracting away the arcane knowledge needed to operate ES, AWS won't be a problem for them.
- jackbravo 7y ago
  Like algolia
  - busterarm 7y ago
    From where I sit, Algolia solves a very small subset of problems that Lucene-based search engines do. Often problems people don't actually have.
- ousta 7y ago
  people that manage elastisearch configurations are not the same people managing hardware, purchasing, hardware admins. obviously you can save some $ reducing your people while moving to the cloud. I agree that for any complex application (and elastic is one when volume is there) there are still pros of the cloud you cant leverage i.e for search on demand infra is pretty much useless if you cant make it happens in microseconds.
- coredog64 7y ago
  At my previous employer we used the AWS managed ES product for an ELK stack that was ingesting terabytes per day. It was painful, and we eventually moved off it, but it was still valuable for the training wheels it provided. If the developers had been better at logging it’s possible we would have been happy to continue on the managed product.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
IshKebab 7y ago
Open core seems to be a good model that satisfies people that want open source stuff but still lets you charge for some features that your competitors can't easily steal. Gitlab is a good example.
- ausjke 7y ago
  freemium/OSS the core, premium the plugins/enterprise-features is one business model. more attractively is the all code for free model, so those who are able can use it for free, and you charge a fee for people who are in need of professional support. a third one is still all code for free, but you can pay for hosted service instead of self-host the code, time is money for many people these days. in all cases, you're building a group of followers with OSS, and you sell the hard-to-grasp or time-is-money-for-some-user domain expertise. how to build your moat as far as competition goes? anyone that is smarter than you could copy all the code and do the same business model, the only thing might be a good license? however these days most OSS license are commercial friendly so I don't know how this works.
  - IshKebab 7y ago
    I think people overestimate the number of customers that need "support". Especially given that the users of projects like these are technically extremely skilled.
- brunoqc 7y ago
  I'm not sure about open core. Why should we contribute to an open core project? What if I want to add a feature that is locked away in the enterprise version? I can't fork for one feature and they won't add it to the main product.
- tracker1 7y ago
  I'm a fan of Open core... the issues come down to a lot of the time, projects will reject contributions, and have pulled features that allow competition with their non-core features. On the one hand, I really do understand the needs here, on the other I wish there was a better option. I wouldn't even mind seeing something like the new MongoDB license + open-core as a non-profit organization that funded the development of several shared projects, where what licensing it does get is directly towards development. It's much different when you are absolutely profit driven. There are a lot of software problems that are hard, but the results can be shared.
WalterSear 7y ago
You choose closed source, recognize that people who won't pay weren't your target market anyway, and accrete the reputation for your product that wins people on the fence over to your paid product/service.
chongli 7y ago
Why not use a dual license model? AGPL for all, commercial license for paying customers. I think a number of companies use this approach.
- crdoconnor 7y ago
  The companies ive seen try this receive an ungodly number of complaints about how theyre ruining open source.
  - toyg 7y ago
    Business and the internet both require pretty thick skins in isolation; combined, they require a turtleshell-like thickness. At some point one has to learn to suck it up.
- sovande 7y ago
  MongoDB used to use AGPL, but apparently that was not good enough. Not sure why?
  - jackbravo 7y ago
    From https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side-public-license-for-mongodb-community-server https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side... > AGPL meant companies who wanted to modify and run MongoDB as a publicly available service had to open source their software or obtain a commercial license from MongoDB With the new license: > The only substantive change is an explicit condition that any organization attempting to exploit MongoDB as a service must open source the software that it uses to offer such service Aaaaaaaaaaaand from the license text itself https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license: > “Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.
Tsubasachan 7y ago
Make stuff people want to pay for? If they don't want to pay for it its shit and you move on.

kristianc 7y ago

> So how do you bootstrap your company? Services

moreira 7y ago

You choose closed source and you get different early adopters. You don't get the same early adopters that try out every new open source project, and that's OK because you're not trying to run an open source project, you're trying to build a business. The people who would resent you for being closed source are just not your target market, and that's OK. Open source is a choice. You get a lot of early adopters, yes, but the project is also completely out of your control. There's nothing stopping anyone else from taking it, putting more resources into it, and stealing your thunder. If you're not happy with that idea, just don't make your code open source. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

capkutay 7y ago
There's also companies that create open source projects and go on to build highly differentiated value-add products on top of it. E.g. Databricks (owners of Apache Spark) who built a great SaaS product for managing data science pipelines. That product is so valuable it's almost as if they don't even need to monetize the spark project by itself. What I don't like is the companies that create some open source project for the hype, then charge for a 'management console' or some marginal add-on.

busterarm 7y ago

Elastic Cloud is far and away the best SaaS ElasticSearch offering. It's in every way a better product than the hosted AWS ElasticSearch service, which I find to be practically unusable. More importantly, I don't know anywhere that uses AWS ElasticSearch where ElasticSearch is a core component of someone's platform. The problem Elastic has is that their Cloud isn't remotely as good as self-hosting. Using their Cloud doesn't abstract away the domain knowledge needed to operate ElasticSearch at scale, so anyone who uses it and becomes competent will eventually self-host. If they can get better at abstracting away the arcane knowledge needed to operate ES, AWS won't be a problem for them.

jackbravo 7y ago
Like algolia
- busterarm 7y ago
  From where I sit, Algolia solves a very small subset of problems that Lucene-based search engines do. Often problems people don't actually have.
ousta 7y ago
people that manage elastisearch configurations are not the same people managing hardware, purchasing, hardware admins. obviously you can save some $ reducing your people while moving to the cloud. I agree that for any complex application (and elastic is one when volume is there) there are still pros of the cloud you cant leverage i.e for search on demand infra is pretty much useless if you cant make it happens in microseconds.
coredog64 7y ago
At my previous employer we used the AWS managed ES product for an ELK stack that was ingesting terabytes per day. It was painful, and we eventually moved off it, but it was still valuable for the training wheels it provided. If the developers had been better at logging it’s possible we would have been happy to continue on the managed product.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

IshKebab 7y ago

Open core seems to be a good model that satisfies people that want open source stuff but still lets you charge for some features that your competitors can't easily steal. Gitlab is a good example.

ausjke 7y ago
freemium/OSS the core, premium the plugins/enterprise-features is one business model. more attractively is the all code for free model, so those who are able can use it for free, and you charge a fee for people who are in need of professional support. a third one is still all code for free, but you can pay for hosted service instead of self-host the code, time is money for many people these days. in all cases, you're building a group of followers with OSS, and you sell the hard-to-grasp or time-is-money-for-some-user domain expertise. how to build your moat as far as competition goes? anyone that is smarter than you could copy all the code and do the same business model, the only thing might be a good license? however these days most OSS license are commercial friendly so I don't know how this works.
- IshKebab 7y ago
  I think people overestimate the number of customers that need "support". Especially given that the users of projects like these are technically extremely skilled.
brunoqc 7y ago
I'm not sure about open core. Why should we contribute to an open core project? What if I want to add a feature that is locked away in the enterprise version? I can't fork for one feature and they won't add it to the main product.
tracker1 7y ago
I'm a fan of Open core... the issues come down to a lot of the time, projects will reject contributions, and have pulled features that allow competition with their non-core features. On the one hand, I really do understand the needs here, on the other I wish there was a better option. I wouldn't even mind seeing something like the new MongoDB license + open-core as a non-profit organization that funded the development of several shared projects, where what licensing it does get is directly towards development. It's much different when you are absolutely profit driven. There are a lot of software problems that are hard, but the results can be shared.

WalterSear 7y ago

You choose closed source, recognize that people who won't pay weren't your target market anyway, and accrete the reputation for your product that wins people on the fence over to your paid product/service.

chongli 7y ago

Why not use a dual license model? AGPL for all, commercial license for paying customers. I think a number of companies use this approach.

crdoconnor 7y ago
The companies ive seen try this receive an ungodly number of complaints about how theyre ruining open source.
- toyg 7y ago
  Business and the internet both require pretty thick skins in isolation; combined, they require a turtleshell-like thickness. At some point one has to learn to suck it up.
sovande 7y ago
MongoDB used to use AGPL, but apparently that was not good enough. Not sure why?
- jackbravo 7y ago
  From https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side-public-license-for-mongodb-community-server https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side... > AGPL meant companies who wanted to modify and run MongoDB as a publicly available service had to open source their software or obtain a commercial license from MongoDB With the new license: > The only substantive change is an explicit condition that any organization attempting to exploit MongoDB as a service must open source the software that it uses to offer such service Aaaaaaaaaaaand from the license text itself https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license: > “Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.

Tsubasachan 7y ago

Make stuff people want to pay for? If they don't want to pay for it its shit and you move on.