5 ms·
If someone can undercut you so easily then your products are overpriced. I would not say this is "not so great for commercial businesses" just because the GPL d
by cycloptic 7y ago
If someone can undercut you so easily then your products are overpriced. I would not say this is "not so great for commercial businesses" just because the GPL does not make an effort to prop up phony business models.
- DangitBobby 7y agoOr they can undercut you because you made your core competency freely available. It cost you a great deal of time and money to make, and it cost then nearly nothing to use. However, while you were pouring time and labor into developing the product, they were doing the same with infrastructure that could support managed offerings of your product and products like yours (without necessarily ever having to do any real innovation or takin on any risk themselves!). Voila, you were undercut without being overpriced.
- cycloptic 7y agoThat still isn't undercutting when you don't even have the infrastructure to sell the proposed service. Those companies are not your competitors.
- DangitBobby 7y agoThey are if the way you monitize your platform is by offering it as a managed service, as is the case with MongoDB. Company A spends 75% of it's resources developing a product and 25% on a platform, Company B spent 75% of Company A's budget just on its platform and uses A's product for free. Who will most likely have a better platform that they can offer at lower cost? In the AWS case, Amazon already spent many multiples of MongoDB budget on their platform, so they were easily able to undercut.