22 ms·

Death of an open-source business model

334 points by randyzwitch 6y ago

macintux 6y ago
I had assumed this was yet another Centos lament, but it was much more interesting than that.
fsflover 6y ago
> if you give your secret sauce away for free, and it gets popular enough, cloud providers will inevitably spin up competitive services using your very own code against you. For some reason, the author never mentioned AGPL. What's wrong with using this license if you want to defend your open-source business model?
- brandmeyer 6y ago
  It doesn't help with the revenue problem, it only helps ensure that any feature additions flow back upstream.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    Any examples where it was a problem?
    - brandmeyer 6y ago
      The article gave a couple of (in)famous examples...
      - fsflover 6y ago
        I just was thinking that AGPL would defend against companies like Microsoft who avoid (A)GPL at all costs.
- hannob 6y ago
  AGPL doesn't allow you to say "I want AWS to pay me if they use my software". As long as AWS abides the rules of the AGPL they can use your software as much as they like and create offerings based on it.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    It's not only about money though, it's also about megacorps extending the code but keeping that code to themselves, not contributing back.
    - brandmeyer 6y ago
      AGPL does help with this. An early example was when Google's search interface answered unit conversion queries using GNU Units. They fixed a bug internally and didn't flow the bug back upstream. Since they weren't distributing Units, but were only executing it as a service, their behavior was strictly conforming to the letter of the GPL. The failure to respect the spirit of the GPL was a factor in AGPL's development. AGPL code is strictly forbidden for use inside the company now, partially because they consider private modifications to open-source software to be a competitive advantage.
  - wmf 6y ago
    This is debated. Some people say that AWS will never touch AGPL software which accomplishes the goal of not getting AWSed while remaining OSI certified.
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      AWS specifically might not, but I can say with some certainty that cloud providers can host AGPL software. It's not impossible that Compose (the now IBM-owned cloud database hosting company) pulled in more revenue from RethinkDB than RethinkDB, Inc., did.
      - wmf 6y ago
        Yeah, it's a matter of risk. Rightly or wrongly you could get hit with a lawsuit that says "we have infected your entire control plane; open-source it or die" and every cloud provider has to weigh that for themselves.
- joejoebags 6y ago
  I'm not super familiar with AGPL and how it might address this issue, but I would love to be enlightened.
  - wmf 6y ago
    Cloud providers and enterprises are afraid of AGPL being "super-viral" so they'll either pay for the non-AGPL version or not touch the software.
    - rocky1138 6y ago
      Or follow the license and provide their changes for maintainers to merge upstream, making the original project better. Isn't that the point of GPL licenses to begin with?
abetusk 6y ago
Mapbox releases Mapbox GL JS v2 under a proprietary license whereas v1 (presumably) was under an "open core" business model. (Mapbox v1 and v2 are graphics card enhanced mapping libraries?). The author of the article's thesis is that this is "an end of an era" of Open Core business models (putting core technology under a free/libre licensing and charging for extra proprietary features). I'm very curious as to what other people here on HN have to say about it. Gitlab, a prominent company that follows an Open Core model, is a YCombinator alum, no?
- Lutger 6y ago
  Yes, and valued at over 6 billion so they seem to do ok
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  I feel like Gitlab will try to pull an Atlassian in the future. They already said they are changing focus to their cloud-based offering over the on-prem version.
  - claytonjy 6y ago
    I worry you're right, and while I think it's bad for what it signals about business model viability, I'm not sure it's bad for how I use GitLab. Do the couple dozen devs at my company really need an internally-hosted version, or should we just pay for the cloud offering and supply our own runners? Seems easy to frame as a wash.
    - leipert 6y ago
      Working at GitLab, but I want to focus on this part of your comment in general: > Do the couple dozen devs at my company really need an internally-hosted version? From personal experience and knowledge through friends: Everyone writes code. Universities, Governments, Governmental agencies, political parties, etc. A lot of them do not want to host in the cloud, especially in Germany, considering that the cloud (depending on the provider you are looking at) means hosting outside of Germany with all that entails privacy and regulation wise.
hacknat 6y ago
I disagree with this article’s premise that all software is services-based. There are lots of open-core business models that can’t be eaten by the cloud providers, because they aren’t services to be spun up. Almost all of the CNCF-based businesses are complex plug-in models that the CPs can’t just make a button for.
- freeqaz 6y ago
  AWS has a hosted version of Kubernetes and Envoy now, and those are both CNCF projects. Other CNCF projects like NATS and Argo have equivalents on AWS today. Even if they're complex and not one-button click to drop in, the cloud providers seem keen on running managed versions of these projects. What projects come to mind as being "immune" to this problem, out of curiosity?
  - joejoebags 6y ago
    I'm curious about this too; I'd love some counter-examples and that was a big reason for me taking the rather arrogant stance of claiming "cloud killed open core." I selfishly wanted to rile up smart folks who could prove me wrong.
  - stingraycharles 6y ago
    Almost by definition the projects that are immune to this are the projects that are not yet popular enough. It’s not a coincidence that it’s Kubernetes and Envoy that are the most popular CNCF projects.
    - jabl 6y ago
      I think CNCF, or more generally, Linux Foundation projects are better characterized as public goods. Basically a bunch of companies, many whom are competitors with each other, get together to improve the commodified base upon which they depend. Saves a lot of $$$ that would otherwise be wasted in wheel reinvention or spent on license fees. For the particular case of AWS now offering Kubernetes, is that: - A win for AWS, since they can leech code without contributing back or - A win for Kubernetes contributors and users vs AWS, since now customers have the option of moving their Kubernetes workloads from AWS to other providers.
dyeje 6y ago
What is dead may never die. Times change, open core isn't and hasn't been viable for a while.
hannob 6y ago
I feel there's a few cases cited here to make a case that an entired business model is dying, but it doesn't look to me that this is an overall trend. You can't extrapolate from "5 projects didn't fare well with this, so it's not working". But there's more. I followed the MongoDB case a bit and it's not exactly how many make it sound like. MongoDB was doing fine as a company. It wasn't like they were unable to pay their programmers because AWS offered a hosted MongoDB. In the months before that controversial license change they got plenty of funding from investors. It looked all more like investors created expectations of future revenue and they became cold feet if they could meet those expectations. It remains to be seen how this will work out in the long run. I'd personally consider everything that depends on MongoDB to be toxic. With that license it won't be shiped in standard linux distros, other projects are less likely to build on it.
- joejoebags 6y ago
  I wrote it last night; I didn't have time to research every "open core" company I could think of to figure out a chronology of their licensing strategy. I decided to publish it based on a limited number of case studies to gin up discussion and hopefully learn from other people about counter-examples. Do you know of any?
  - hannob 6y ago
    Of course by mentioning any name here I risk that they might be a future candidate of closing down and you say "gotcha" :-) Not all of them are "open core" in the sense that they have a core product and proprietary extensions (some just opensource everything they make), but a number of relevant companies around FOSS products: Gitlab, MariaDB Corporation, Blindside Networks (Big Blue Button), Qt Company, Mattermost Inc.
    - joejoebags 6y ago
      Thanks, those are great examples. I've considered writing about Mattermost before, as I think it's a fascinating pattern that I haven't seen much elsewhere. Attack an existing, high-profile app by cloning it in the open but then additionally build a for-profit company around the clone. Truly a galaxy brain strategy.
lukestateson 6y ago
[del]
- xenocratus 6y ago
  Title doesn't say "open source is dead" - it says "Death of an open source business model", I'd say those two are quite different...
  - spurdoman77 6y ago
    Yeah, and only one business model is dead. There are others and will be. Use open source the smart way and you can make money.
unreal37 6y ago
100% agree. Make a thing, and charge a reasonable amount for it. And if someone wants to make the same category of product free and open source, that's cool too. Live and let live.
lock-free 6y ago
In the back of the head this gives me an idea for a marketplace startup for software utilities but I know it's been tried before and died. I don't know how to align the incentives of creators to where we can make a marketplace where open source is lucrative by design. But I don't think it's impossible, just the social hurdles haven't been cleared yet. Not much technology to throw down on the problem.
- joejoebags 6y ago
  You might be interested in Tidelift https://www.tidelift.com/ https://www.tidelift.com/
  - lock-free 6y ago
    Not really what I'm thinking, I see these attempts at funding maintainers pop up each year and I think they all share the same problem and take the wrong approach.
infinity0 6y ago
I wish there was a FOSS license with a clause along the lines of: - if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it. Ofc, they (FSF/OSI/DFSG) would have to relax their FOSS definition(s), but with more projects dying in this way hopefully more FOSS organisations will take heed and think about this. Ofc, the wording of the license has to be precise enough to avoid something like fobbing off the servers to technically be controlled by subsidiaries with 0 revenue.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it." That would just be a proprietary license with source availability. It would also dry up any community contributions since contributors are generally not going to help a for-profit project without themselves getting paid.
  - zrail 6y ago
    The Mapbox people make the point that, at least in terms of their core functionality, there wasn't really a community outside of mapbox employees.
  - infinity0 6y ago
    Sure, the license would have to figure out how to share revenue with major contributors too. > contributors are generally not going to help a for-profit project without themselves getting paid. Contributors already contribute to for-profit open source projects without themselves getting paid. This license would make the situation strictly better for them.
shvedchenko 6y ago
one more article about death of something. if you want people read your article, just yell that something they love is dead. works every time.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- herodoturtle 6y ago
  Hah, yes. I'd write an article about VR, entitled: "Death of monitors."
philipswood 6y ago
if only there was a way to make cloud providers charge a per second usage charge for software used... And an open source licence that could support that...
- dboreham 6y ago
  I've been thinking about this in my spare time for a while, under the working title "General Magic License"+. I think it's a good way (the only way) to reason about the whole "who pays for open source development?" problem. If you can define the terms of that license, and figure out how to get licensors to follow the terms, and copyright owners to license their code under it, then <boom>. Also it may be possible to prove the converse -- that it's impossible to define such a license. Then we can all get back to work on proprietary software, or at least know we're not going to get paid. +Yes, I know.
indymike 6y ago
Self-hosting of software is what is changing. The open-core model is really built around maintaining installations of software on your own hardware (or virtual hardware). "Paying for pro" made sense in that world. With many things you would have installed and maintained on your own hardware moving to a SaaS model and PaaS model, there's really not much of an opportunity to "sell the pro version" outside large enterprises who are 10 years behind the curve. My latest startup owns zero servers. Costs scale on user count (for office stuff) or utilization. Licenses? I get calls from software vendors, and it's hard to even understand what they are selling because I don't buy licenses anymore.
- joejoebags 6y ago
  I like this article from 2014 that touches on some of the same great points you're making here: https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-want-to-be-the-next-red-hat/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-wa...
  - jabl 6y ago
    One thing I recently stumbled upon that struck me was Bryan Cantrill's writeup at http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts-its-midlife-crisis/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts... and https://sfosc.org/docs https://sfosc.org/docs that was linked from that blog post. Quick takeaways about open source business models: - Dual licensing: Well, poison. Who's want to sign away their copyrights so that some company can make a buck? It's essentially proprietary software that also happens to be available open source under some as-tedious-as-possible licensing terms. - Open core: Essentially proprietary software with an open source loss leader. Or for the supermarket chain variant of this business model: "We're opening a new supermarket! Free plastic buckets to the first 1000 customers", causing hours-long queues of people that really want a $2 plastic bucket for free. And as we've seen, it's not much of a protection against big cloud providers with armies of programmers that can easily recreate whatever proprietary juice you have added on top, adapted to their particular environment. - Public goods: Like Linux Foundation projects like the Linux kernel or Kubernetes. Can work, but is not the direct core value of any of the companies participating. Similarly, a company in some other industry may share some code as open source in order to reduce the maintenance burden. - Free software product: The flag bearer being Redhat. Code itself may all be open source, but a company call sell a particular version of it with support, training etc. Might not get the growth numbers and scale that gets VC's excited (as can be seen in the blog post the parent linked to), but can be sustainable.
thayne 6y ago
Redis is given as one of the examples of "open core" failing. But even if you treat the new Redis source available license as completely proprietary, Redis is still open core, since the core is still licensed with BSD 3-clause. It is just that some of the extensions that used to be open source are now proprietary.
zokier 6y ago
I'd say good riddance. Open core to me always felt more "openwashing" than honest attempt to build free software project/community. Part of the feeling arises from the fact that when teenager me first started learning about foss software, Linux, GNU etc one of the things that made such a great impression was that there was no feature gating, no "enterprise editions", nothing locked away. Instead I had all the power in the world on my fingertips. The idea of being built by hackers for hackers to fill their needs resonated to me a lot, not having marketing or product driven development but scratching your own itches. Open core fits very poorly to that worldview. edit: This comment might have started out bit harsh, apologies. I did not mean to imply malice on the companies that tried to make open core work, but rather bit of naivete or misunderstanding regarding open source and building business around that.
- macjohnmcc 6y ago
  Also commercial entities using these open source products for profit doesn't sound like it would fit either. A commercial entity is not a hacker.
lepikhin 6y ago
Can the license simply have a clause that user is not in Amazon, Microsoft or any public cloud provider?
- senko 6y ago
  Sure. It wouldn't be open source any longer, tho.
  - _puk 6y ago
    There's more than one licence that's open source. Is there a reason that a new style of licence that prevents the "fork and suffocate" approach of these large companies can't be ratified as fitting with core open source values? Being dogmatic about the definition of open source, and not allowing that to evolve over time, feels like hard times ahead.
    - _puk 6y ago
      And just to build on that thought. (IMO) The only people who really care about open source are us, the philanthropic builders of said software. If we shout down those in our community who question the status quo, by simply stating "it's not open source", then we lose those people. Given the hard stance we see on open source, it's very seldom that the reply to that is "but why can't it be". An analogy that springs to mind is jslint (bear with me here..). A great idea that had true belief at heart, but was just too strict for mass adoption. JSLint started a wave of enforcement that was needed, yet the far more flexible jshint (and subsequent eslint) won out in the long run. I'm fully onboard with truly open source, and think there will always be a place for it. But feel that being all or nothing suffocates the discussion.
      - julianmarq 6y ago
        Nothing is stopping you from using your own source available license. Mongo did it, and they're doing okay. It seems like you're arguing something different: You (general you) want the distinction and, more importantly, goodwill that the "open source" label gives you, but without actually having to fit the parameters of "open source".
waynesonfire 6y ago
good for them, developers will just spin up open-source competitors and eat their lunch.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
This seems to me more like another case of "death of a business model caused by revenue maximization strategy". "Open-core" does not have "non-viable" or even "must-be-bait-and-switch" stamped all over it. But if the organization using it decides that its primary goal is revenue maximization (and/or significant growth), then it becomes much more questionable how it will fare. But isn't that the goal of any business, I hear you cry? No, it certainly is not. There are thousands of small businesses even just in the USA that are happy to work within the limitations of their situation and initial desires.
- Veen 6y ago
  It's not necessarily the organization and its founders who have revenue maximization as a primary goal. The other factor is hundreds of millions of dollars of VC money, and VCs are definitely all about revenue maximization. MapBox has raised quarter of a billion. The conundrum is how does a company develop software as complex as MapBox without relying on VC cash to get the ball rolling.
  - joejoebags 6y ago
    Great point. Are there any bootstrapped $1B+ open core companies? There are a surprising number of proprietary ones (e.g. Esri, Mailchimp, etc.)
    - vaibhavgandhi12 6y ago
      Cloudera
- Someone 6y ago
  So, you’re running a small restaurant, and are fine with it staying small, as long as you can make a living. You publish all your recipes under a permissive license. A restaurant chain starts selling your dishes, using your name, but, because of their scale, cheaper than you can afford to. If you still manage to make money, you may be fine with that, but that’s where the correspondence breaks. In real life, that restaurant chain offers a better product, not because its dishes are better, but because its restaurants are in better locations (have faster network connections), are closer to cinemas and theaters (they offer a zillion other products), etc., and, unlike with restaurants, you can’t make money by branding yourself as “the original”. I don’t see that smaller restaurant staying in business, unless it starts making new recipes it keeps for itself.
sytse 6y ago
In the future contributors might insist on a DCO instead of an CLA so that it is impossible for the project to change from open source to a closed license. Debian insisted on that when switching to GitLab https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-dco-license/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-...
ironmagma 6y ago
As much as I want open source software to be good, commercial software has the inherent advantage of having hierarchies and teams that are all powered by compensation. We could really use some kind of platform in the open source community built around (a) making it easy to fund projects, AND (b) making those projects organizable, with a team lead and contributors.
- hpoe 6y ago
  Counterpoint to that, all the tools I use most often and am most delighted by are published under a GPL or other FOSS license (Bash, Linux, Emacs, Firefox, Inkscape, etc) whereas the ones I am most constantly frustrated by, angry at, and find the most fault with are closed source proprietary company developed (Anything that starts with MS, VMWare Fusion, etc)
  - ironmagma 6y ago
    Firefox is developed by a company with hierarchies. Those other ones have the advantage of being very old and lots of time to iterate on them. Open source produces lots of gems, the problem is that it is very slow moving and IMO the effectiveness is cut in 10 by duplication of effort and lack of coordination. For every successful open source project, there are about 20 stubs and 5-10 less successful open source programs that do basically the same thing.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    Agreed. Hierarchies are an advantage only if the people on top of the hierarchy are either unusually right or unusually good at hiring and deferring to people who know better than they do.
- diffeomorphism 6y ago
  Big questions: Who pays for credit processing, auditing etc.? One platform or many? Are the managing people allowed to make a profit? How do you ensure that important but boring projects get money as well? See the ubuntu software store, elementary OS, patreon/liberapay, .... Edit: Also "commercial" is the wrong word. You mean proprietary. You are very much encouraged to sell free software https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
But… there's nothing wrong with the business model, no? It's not that they aren't making money by selling an enhanced version of the software, it's that they aren't making as much money as cloud services? Or did I misunderstand?
infoseek12 6y ago
2020 strike again! Seriously though, this article makes some assumptions I’m not sure about. One of them is that Mapbox’s move will be successful. I’m not sure it will be, most users of Mapbox probably won’t upgrade to the new version or will upgrade to whatever fork becomes most popular. In the meantime this is going to make people a lot warier of using them as a tile server and give impetus to their competitors in that market space. It’s quite possible they’ll start to see declining revenues pretty soon. The success of their strategy is tied to the greatly expanded 3D capabilities of version two. It’s really cool and the demos are super sexy but for the vast majority of use cases 2D maps are a better fit. Given the distrust they’ve generated and the massive increase in licensing cost attached to their new model for many customers, there are now some extremely compelling reasons for customers to drop them.
dboreham 6y ago
Who would have guessed? If you give away your product, it's hard to make money.
lacker 6y ago
My interpretation is the opposite. MongoDB is clearly successful - they are a public company worth 16 billion dollars. And they proving the success of the open core business model. For 99% of use cases, MongoDB is open source. You can see the code, you can make modifications, you can use it for free in your business, you can share your changes with others, you can integrate it into your products and services. Yeah, you can't use it if you're working at AWS, but for most people it's just fine. For founders creating new open source companies, it's a great strategy to go the route of MongoDB. Start off open source and sell services. If you run into big enough problems with direct competitors using your own software, you can modify the license to exclude them. This is far better than the status quo in, say, 2010, when the conventional wisdom was that if you're providing a service it shouldn't involve any open source at all.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- julianmarq 6y ago
  I'd replace mongo with redis in your comment. Redis truly is open core, but mongo no longer is. Now it's source available, and has been removed from the repos of many distros. Calling mongo open source now just dilutes what "open source" actually means. The organization even removed the submission of its license for approval by the OSI. It's source available, and it's up to each person to decide whether that's good or bad.
  - lacker 6y ago
    That’s true, but Redis and MongoDB are at different points in their growth. Redis is worth around 1 billion, and they are still private. I would not be surprised if Redis usage continues to grow, which attracts more competitors, and they eventually shift to a “99% open” model more similar to MongoDB.
  - aaron_m04 6y ago
    > Now it's source available, and has been removed from the repos of many distros. I wasn't aware the licensing is more restrictive now.
bradwood 6y ago
Sorry, call me a grammar Nazi, but when I see the word "thusly" when "thus" is perfectly serviceable, I can't be bothered to read any more...
- joejoebags 6y ago
  Allow me to be at your service: you are a grammar nazi
  - joejoebags 6y ago
    how would you prefer that sentence be written?
    - bradwood 6y ago
      s/thusly/thus/
type0 6y ago
I would argue that open core isn't a business model but more of a development strategy.
linuxhansl 6y ago
IMHO "open core" is not a good idea in the first place. Open source is about an open community, open contributions, the multiplier you get from contributions from multiple companies. That way open source is a win-win. Companies benefit from each other's contributions. It's _not_ about just showing the code or a free-for-all. Once you have free and non-free tiers it's already broken. The incentives no longer align. I'm being paid in part to work on the open source projects that we utilize for our service(s). Some of those we started, some of those we're contributing to, but we _own_ none of them. We handed them off to external entities (Apache and others) for governance and we actively encourage others to participate.
- nine_k 6y ago
  IMHO, free + non-free can be fine, e.g. AGPL + commercial cloud license.
  - smichel17 6y ago
    Dual license is different than open core. I would be interested to see if a permissive core with dual-licensed (AGPL+ commercial) extensions would work, for something like GitLab. It's not that big of a step on top of their current model where the proprietary bits are still source-available.
    - BubuIIC 6y ago
      That would be lovely indeed!
    - ameliaquining 6y ago
      Redis is doing this and so far they seem to be doing fine. But it's early.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nikitaga 6y ago
Are there more promising alternatives to open source funding than open core or charging for associated services like hosting, support, etc.?
jokethrowaway 6y ago
Open source doesn't work and I'm glad the world is starting to understand. It promotes unfair compensation (or lack thereof). If you have the skills to advance technology and no capital to invest to acquire other technical solutions you may need, you can get a job and use that money to pay what Expecting free work from people rarely work, there are just not enough motivated individuals willing to work and maintain something for free. Most open source I rely on is either backed by a giant company which uses it as a way to attract talents (and retain talents, by letting their employee work on their favourite project on company time) or it's unmaintained. If it's unmaintained I either need to do the work myself or hire someone, which introduces a myriad of variables. I'd rather hire the author but often he's busy with his real job and doesn't think he can live off its project. If it wasn't for the OSS movement and the sheer amount of free work we would have a network of company buying OSS solutions and, most likely, more distributed, smaller companies that produce and resell proprietary software.
- nine_k 6y ago
  Why, open source does work: look at Linux, Webkit, Postgres, LLVM, any programming language with wide adoption, every serious Web framework. But open source does not necessarily mean: - that the bulk of the work is done by people at their leisure, unpaid; - that commercial use for free is necessarily easy or possible; dual licensing has a long history. - that large companies have no interest in maintaining, advancing, financing, or starting open-source projects: currently the opposite is true.
- argomo 6y ago
  I think you've successfully argued against your own point. With open source, developers are paid for ∆V -- the amount of value added to a project. Companies are paid $0 in most models but it's backed by a monetization model that's non-zero. Basically, more work == more value == more pay. With proprietary software, developers are still paid ∆V, but companies are paid for V∆t -- value times the duration of usage. While some of this is just compensation for risking investor money, the ultimate model is rent-seeking and lock-in. This is extractive because the company keeps getting paid even when they don't add value. You may raise concern that volunteer developers don't get compensation, but use that a problem for a voluntary activity? People program as a hobby, to scratch an itch, to develop mastery, to solve a problem they already have, to advance an ideology, or for a chance at recognition/popularity. Only that last one is anything near a problem, and it's the same boat as first time authors or artists.
LeonidBugaev 6y ago
I work with open-source for the last 8 years, as a business owner and as contributor. There are a lot of people who assume that the biggest value of using open-source project that it is free. Additionally there are a lot of idealists who think about oss as foss. Open-source is not dead, it just trying to find a sustainable model for survival. None of the active OSS projects you know exist without money flow. Even if you have hyped project now, without money it will be dead in a year. More and more companies consider open-source as default option, because there are a better tools right now to make business out of it. And everyone essentially wins from it. Yes, old models of OSS are mostly dead. But new ones are alive more than ever.
smashah 6y ago
As a maintainer of a a relatively tiny "open source" project, I've been going through the same thing over the last few months. People relied on the project, ok let's go open-core 99% is free, a few obscure features require a license key. Now I'm seeing cloud providers built on top of my project with almost no significant changes (other than I guess bypassing my licensing mechanism) and they contribute nothing in terms of support or code. Now I'm building out the cloud service and am slowly moving away from this being an open source project to more like a project that has some code that you can see and a public issue tracker. I have several pitch decks/one pagers ready to go and written up for VCs but have been hesitant due the reasoning in this article. But there is soon coming a time when I will have to pull the trigger and send those emails.
ThePhysicist 6y ago
Open core makes sense if you can provide a "light" version of your product that is already useful, and most professional users of your free product will eventually get into a situation where the "pro" version will save them money or will have a feature they dearly need, so they upgrade. I'm not familiar with Mapbox JS toolkit but maybe the problem was that the free version was too useful already, so only a few of the free users saw the need to upgrade? In that case I can understand why they put it under a commercial license, because providing free support for the project can be a burden.
mauricio 6y ago
I think the business model and the software license often get conflated like this. Once you release software with an open source license, users are free to do what they wish as long as it's within the bounds of the license. Separately comes the business model. If a business intends on selling a hosted version of their product, as most open source database companies seem to want to do, that product needs to compete on its own merits. Can the business truly offer a better hosting experience on someone else's cloud than those cloud providers themselves? I think maybe we conflate the two because we want everything. We want to create open source products that a community contributes to and supports but that only the originating company can monetize. It just doesn't work that way.
coward8675309 6y ago
It's not clear to me that open-source-as-a-business-model was ever vibrant enough that it makes sense to say it has now died. Open-source-as-a-funding-model was surely a thing, but turning open source into a source of consistent and growing free cash flow has been much more rare. At my last start-up the first things to go out the window when we wanted to stop burning money were the commercial Aerospike and Nginx licenses. That was five years ago. The most durable model for commercially-funded open source is as a stratagem for commoditizing someone's complement. If you want to stick it to Apple, fund Android. If you want to stick it to Oracle, fund PostgreSQL. If you want to stick it to Microsoft, fund LibreOffice. If you want to stick it to Sun -- er, Oracle -- fund Linux.
- galaxyLogic 6y ago
  > turning open source into a source of consistent and growing free cash flow No doubt about that. If you give away the source for free that doesn't produce any cash-flow. If you sell services you sell services. The value-add proposition of "open source companies" I think is they know the software so you can hire them to do things with it, and they can adapt their open source software if needed as they go along. So that is a service-model. Open Source licenses can help companies that do this. Open Source is its own worst enemy. At some point an OS project becomes so GOOD that you don't need to be its developer to use it and adapt it or build Cloud-services around it. Further if they need the expertise of the original developers they can simply hire them. The ethos of open source doesn't forbid you from having an employer. An ethical OS-hacker should be happy getting a salary from whichever company lets him or her write Open Source software. That includes companies like Amazon and Microsoft and IBM who then sell the right to use that software on their Cloud. If this is the correct ethical model then we should not blame Amazon or Google, they do contribute to copyleft Open Source projects. We should blame smaller companies like MongoDB etc. who do not offer "pure" Open Source licenses. So I'm thinking it's not so much the Open Source Business Model that is in crisis. It is the Open Source Ethical Model, which needs to reflect upon itself in the time of Cloud. Is it really more ethical to work for Amazon writing Open Source, than writing Non-Open-Source for a small company which wants to make sure it is not crushed by Amazon?
permille42 6y ago
Post logic: Here is an example of a company taking their software closed sourced after previously being open. Also, AWS. AWS uses the crud out of open source. They admittedly "steal" it in that they fork it internally, applying patches, add UI, and then sell it. They still depend highly on basically all the open source software in the world. That Amazon does this is a rallying call for new licensing schemes. Large monopolistic companies such as Amazon need to be legally shut out of this type of abuse of open source software. So long as we go "It's fine. You have to allow this to truly embrace open source" then we will continue to see Amazon try to shut down all "open core companies" that they can by outright stealing their IP. Open source is not developed primarily by hobbyists or aficionados. Most open source imo comes from closed source projects being open sourced by companies in order to gain free testing, free work ( contributions ), and more market share ( exposure / interest ) Heralding the death of open-source seems like nonsense just to grab attention. I agree that the large companies are trying to crush open-core companies that are small, but it is obvious they are doing this and there will be a backlash from those of us who don't appreciate their meddling.
- simonh 6y ago
  Let me play devils advocate for a minute. Maybe what Amazon is doing is just fine. If they had to roll all of their services from scratch themselves, they’d be massively more expensive and dramatically less compatible with everything else. The fact that Amazon and many other hosting companies can offer cheap commodity services based on familiar building blocks is a huge benefit to the world enabled by open source. That’s exactly what open source is about, making the world a better place. I’m not entirely convinced by my own argument, but I’m having trouble seeing the world as on the whole a worse place with AWS in it.
  - permille42 6y ago
    What Amazon is doing is not fine in any way. Having seen their dev process from the inside it is an absolute nightmare. They give zero shits about the wellfare of their devs nor about their contribution to open source. The only reason they ever release things to open source is to try to get people to use their paid services. Eg: attention. They view open source only as an advertisement and nothing more. The problem isn't that they use open source. It is that they spend a lot of dev times fixing all the bugs and then don't contribute them back upstream. They have sooo many internal patches that should go back but they go "if we contributed them back people wouldn't use our more reliable paid service based on that". They are the exact opposite of the healthy hacker mentality that has brought Linux to the state it is today. Fuck Amazon * 100. The world isn't a better place in any way with them. Their services aren't cheap in any sense. Also, behind the scenes all those services you think are "ultra stable" are actual unstable and flaky as hell. Ask anyone who has worked at Amazon for more than a year and they'll tell you that it is constantly in pants on fire mode. All engineers are required to be on call because they have that many fires every single fucking day.
aazaa 6y ago
Could it be that, rather than the death of a particular variety of open source ("Open Core"), that the author has in fact described yet another open source business model? One that specifically extends Open Core? Consider: - Company releases the Secret Sauce as open source under a highly permissive (non-reciprocal) license - Secret Sauce coalesces a large, engaged community around it - Company pays the bills with support, consulting, and other complementary products/services as it bootstraps itself - Company releases v2 under a traditional non-open license Everyone profits from this arrangement, potentially. Small users get good, free software to bootstrap projects. Big companies build stuff on top. And in the end, Company takes a portion of the open source audience with it into v2. Finding that audience and getting them to pay attention is not easy at all. Think of Open Core as the car that gets you there, to borrow a quote from "The Comeback."
- chii 6y ago
  What you've described is basically a bait and switch, but worded nicely.
- Sophistifunk 6y ago
  This is actually a very interesting take on this phenomena I haven't come across before, cheers.
Drdrdrq 6y ago
> Redis adopted a strategy of adding a severely restrictive “commons clause” to updated versions of their existing open source tools,... Severely restrictive? I'm amazed at how bad (undeserved imho) reputation Commons Clause license got. The new Redis tools' license is basically the same, just less clear. The same with MongoDB and MariaDB's licenses. In effect, they all forbid selling to 3rd parties - and yet, being less clear, they are deemed 'OK' while Commons Clause, clear and to the point, is frowned upon. I firmly believe that both proprietary and FOSS licenses are extremes and that a new batch of "cloud protection licenses" will help develop software that will protect core users' freedoms and still allow maintainers to work on in fulltime. Commons Clause was simply ahead of its time - I'm waiting for its descendants to prosper.
jrochkind1 6y ago
I believe this is mis-stating the extent of redis re-licensing. http://antirez.com/news/120 http://antirez.com/news/120 > Today a page about the new Common Clause license in the Redis Labs web site was interpreted as if Redis itself switched license. This is not the case, Redis is, and will remain, BSD licensed. > What is happening instead is that certain Redis modules, developed inside Redis Labs, are now released under the Common Clause (using Apache license as a base license). This means that basically certain enterprise add-ons… That is from a few years ago, but I believe it's still true, and basic redis is still FreeBSD. This isn't a slight of hand where "basic redis core" is open source but not really useful by itself, I think the majority of redis installs have never been using those "enterprise add-ons". I don't think this is necessarily a problem for the author's theory in general, which I am generally sympathetic to as accurately describing something going on in the software world right now, but I think it's misinformation about redis.
- TAForObvReasons 6y ago
  Redis core is still BSD-3-Clause https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/6.0/COPYING https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/6.0/COPYING But it doesn't change the essence of the argument posited by the author. The redis modules in question were originally AGPL. Redis Labs relicensed them to Apache+Commons Clause. Both Redis Labs and Mongo reacted to pressure by relicensing software.
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    But then redis is essentially still the "open core" model he is saying is dead. I agree it doesn't really disprove his general story (which I agree is a trend), it doesn't have to be universal to be a trend, a very strong trend even, there can be special unusual circumstances behind redis, or it can just not yet have succumbed but be on the way, or it can just be an unexplained exception to a strong trend. It just makes redis not a great example to choose, and it makes his article misleading giving people the wrong idea about what's going on with redis.
- hodgesrm 6y ago
  What's "going on in software" is that most businesses don't want to devote a lot of resources to operating software themselves in the cloud. If you sell popular software and don't provide a cloud service, you are basically opening up an opportunity for somebody else to do it. Public clouds tend to jump on this because it sells underlying infrastructure in addition to the management value add. OSS companies like Mongo, DataBricks, and Confluent run popular cloud services. They all seem to be doing fine for this reason. I don't see a lot of proof that changing their licensing was a root cause of their success.
danbmil99 6y ago
I don't think anyone should have a realistic expectation of making money directly from an open source project. You have to be strategic and tactical in how you approach the problem of monetizing. If you don't do it, someone like Amazon will. If you want to make that difficult or impossible, use a copyleft license. The choice of a permissive license implies things that you have to think about upfront.
SergeAx 6y ago
It is not a "cloud" that damages open core projects, it is Wal-Martesque cloud providers. If you are buying lots of infrastructure from AWS, there's just no reason to buy MongoDB or Redis from their creators: you would just put more load on your accounting, monitoring and cost controlling and will have nothing extra in return, except pride for supporting open source. There is an interesting model at Google cloud, where I can deploy and use a Grafana stack for moderate $50/month. Looks like Grafana gets a solid chunk of these money - they are advertising it on their own website.
open-source-ux 6y ago
There never was an open-source business model. Among the thousands of open-source projects, the ones championed as a successful business make a tiny proportion i.e. the exception not the norm. Meanwhile the SaaS business model continues to eat the software market. A model that gives users less control than the desktop software model. Open-source software has been critical to the success of the SaaS model. You could argue SaaS is the true success of the 'open-source business model'. Just not the way open-source advocates expected it to be.

334 points by randyzwitch 6y ago

I had assumed this was yet another Centos lament, but it was much more interesting than that.

> if you give your secret sauce away for free, and it gets popular enough, cloud providers will inevitably spin up competitive services using your very own code against you. For some reason, the author never mentioned AGPL. What's wrong with using this license if you want to defend your open-source business model?

brandmeyer 6y ago
It doesn't help with the revenue problem, it only helps ensure that any feature additions flow back upstream.
- fsflover 6y ago
  Any examples where it was a problem?
  - brandmeyer 6y ago
    The article gave a couple of (in)famous examples...
    - fsflover 6y ago
      I just was thinking that AGPL would defend against companies like Microsoft who avoid (A)GPL at all costs.
hannob 6y ago
AGPL doesn't allow you to say "I want AWS to pay me if they use my software". As long as AWS abides the rules of the AGPL they can use your software as much as they like and create offerings based on it.
- GordonS 6y ago
  It's not only about money though, it's also about megacorps extending the code but keeping that code to themselves, not contributing back.
  - brandmeyer 6y ago
    AGPL does help with this. An early example was when Google's search interface answered unit conversion queries using GNU Units. They fixed a bug internally and didn't flow the bug back upstream. Since they weren't distributing Units, but were only executing it as a service, their behavior was strictly conforming to the letter of the GPL. The failure to respect the spirit of the GPL was a factor in AGPL's development. AGPL code is strictly forbidden for use inside the company now, partially because they consider private modifications to open-source software to be a competitive advantage.
- wmf 6y ago
  This is debated. Some people say that AWS will never touch AGPL software which accomplishes the goal of not getting AWSed while remaining OSI certified.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    AWS specifically might not, but I can say with some certainty that cloud providers can host AGPL software. It's not impossible that Compose (the now IBM-owned cloud database hosting company) pulled in more revenue from RethinkDB than RethinkDB, Inc., did.
    - wmf 6y ago
      Yeah, it's a matter of risk. Rightly or wrongly you could get hit with a lawsuit that says "we have infected your entire control plane; open-source it or die" and every cloud provider has to weigh that for themselves.
joejoebags 6y ago
I'm not super familiar with AGPL and how it might address this issue, but I would love to be enlightened.
- wmf 6y ago
  Cloud providers and enterprises are afraid of AGPL being "super-viral" so they'll either pay for the non-AGPL version or not touch the software.
  - rocky1138 6y ago
    Or follow the license and provide their changes for maintainers to merge upstream, making the original project better. Isn't that the point of GPL licenses to begin with?

abetusk 6y ago

Mapbox releases Mapbox GL JS v2 under a proprietary license whereas v1 (presumably) was under an "open core" business model. (Mapbox v1 and v2 are graphics card enhanced mapping libraries?). The author of the article's thesis is that this is "an end of an era" of Open Core business models (putting core technology under a free/libre licensing and charging for extra proprietary features). I'm very curious as to what other people here on HN have to say about it. Gitlab, a prominent company that follows an Open Core model, is a YCombinator alum, no?

Lutger 6y ago
Yes, and valued at over 6 billion so they seem to do ok
selfhoster11 6y ago
I feel like Gitlab will try to pull an Atlassian in the future. They already said they are changing focus to their cloud-based offering over the on-prem version.
- claytonjy 6y ago
  I worry you're right, and while I think it's bad for what it signals about business model viability, I'm not sure it's bad for how I use GitLab. Do the couple dozen devs at my company really need an internally-hosted version, or should we just pay for the cloud offering and supply our own runners? Seems easy to frame as a wash.
  - leipert 6y ago
    Working at GitLab, but I want to focus on this part of your comment in general: > Do the couple dozen devs at my company really need an internally-hosted version? From personal experience and knowledge through friends: Everyone writes code. Universities, Governments, Governmental agencies, political parties, etc. A lot of them do not want to host in the cloud, especially in Germany, considering that the cloud (depending on the provider you are looking at) means hosting outside of Germany with all that entails privacy and regulation wise.

hacknat 6y ago

I disagree with this article’s premise that all software is services-based. There are lots of open-core business models that can’t be eaten by the cloud providers, because they aren’t services to be spun up. Almost all of the CNCF-based businesses are complex plug-in models that the CPs can’t just make a button for.

freeqaz 6y ago
AWS has a hosted version of Kubernetes and Envoy now, and those are both CNCF projects. Other CNCF projects like NATS and Argo have equivalents on AWS today. Even if they're complex and not one-button click to drop in, the cloud providers seem keen on running managed versions of these projects. What projects come to mind as being "immune" to this problem, out of curiosity?
- joejoebags 6y ago
  I'm curious about this too; I'd love some counter-examples and that was a big reason for me taking the rather arrogant stance of claiming "cloud killed open core." I selfishly wanted to rile up smart folks who could prove me wrong.
- stingraycharles 6y ago
  Almost by definition the projects that are immune to this are the projects that are not yet popular enough. It’s not a coincidence that it’s Kubernetes and Envoy that are the most popular CNCF projects.
  - jabl 6y ago
    I think CNCF, or more generally, Linux Foundation projects are better characterized as public goods. Basically a bunch of companies, many whom are competitors with each other, get together to improve the commodified base upon which they depend. Saves a lot of $$$ that would otherwise be wasted in wheel reinvention or spent on license fees. For the particular case of AWS now offering Kubernetes, is that: - A win for AWS, since they can leech code without contributing back or - A win for Kubernetes contributors and users vs AWS, since now customers have the option of moving their Kubernetes workloads from AWS to other providers.

dyeje 6y ago

What is dead may never die. Times change, open core isn't and hasn't been viable for a while.

hannob 6y ago

I feel there's a few cases cited here to make a case that an entired business model is dying, but it doesn't look to me that this is an overall trend. You can't extrapolate from "5 projects didn't fare well with this, so it's not working". But there's more. I followed the MongoDB case a bit and it's not exactly how many make it sound like. MongoDB was doing fine as a company. It wasn't like they were unable to pay their programmers because AWS offered a hosted MongoDB. In the months before that controversial license change they got plenty of funding from investors. It looked all more like investors created expectations of future revenue and they became cold feet if they could meet those expectations. It remains to be seen how this will work out in the long run. I'd personally consider everything that depends on MongoDB to be toxic. With that license it won't be shiped in standard linux distros, other projects are less likely to build on it.

joejoebags 6y ago
I wrote it last night; I didn't have time to research every "open core" company I could think of to figure out a chronology of their licensing strategy. I decided to publish it based on a limited number of case studies to gin up discussion and hopefully learn from other people about counter-examples. Do you know of any?
- hannob 6y ago
  Of course by mentioning any name here I risk that they might be a future candidate of closing down and you say "gotcha" :-) Not all of them are "open core" in the sense that they have a core product and proprietary extensions (some just opensource everything they make), but a number of relevant companies around FOSS products: Gitlab, MariaDB Corporation, Blindside Networks (Big Blue Button), Qt Company, Mattermost Inc.
  - joejoebags 6y ago
    Thanks, those are great examples. I've considered writing about Mattermost before, as I think it's a fascinating pattern that I haven't seen much elsewhere. Attack an existing, high-profile app by cloning it in the open but then additionally build a for-profit company around the clone. Truly a galaxy brain strategy.

lukestateson 6y ago

[del]

xenocratus 6y ago
Title doesn't say "open source is dead" - it says "Death of an open source business model", I'd say those two are quite different...
- spurdoman77 6y ago
  Yeah, and only one business model is dead. There are others and will be. Use open source the smart way and you can make money.

unreal37 6y ago

100% agree. Make a thing, and charge a reasonable amount for it. And if someone wants to make the same category of product free and open source, that's cool too. Live and let live.

lock-free 6y ago

In the back of the head this gives me an idea for a marketplace startup for software utilities but I know it's been tried before and died. I don't know how to align the incentives of creators to where we can make a marketplace where open source is lucrative by design. But I don't think it's impossible, just the social hurdles haven't been cleared yet. Not much technology to throw down on the problem.

joejoebags 6y ago
You might be interested in Tidelift https://www.tidelift.com/ https://www.tidelift.com/
- lock-free 6y ago
  Not really what I'm thinking, I see these attempts at funding maintainers pop up each year and I think they all share the same problem and take the wrong approach.

infinity0 6y ago

I wish there was a FOSS license with a clause along the lines of: - if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it. Ofc, they (FSF/OSI/DFSG) would have to relax their FOSS definition(s), but with more projects dying in this way hopefully more FOSS organisations will take heed and think about this. Ofc, the wording of the license has to be precise enough to avoid something like fobbing off the servers to technically be controlled by subsidiaries with 0 revenue.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it." That would just be a proprietary license with source availability. It would also dry up any community contributions since contributors are generally not going to help a for-profit project without themselves getting paid.
- zrail 6y ago
  The Mapbox people make the point that, at least in terms of their core functionality, there wasn't really a community outside of mapbox employees.
- infinity0 6y ago
  Sure, the license would have to figure out how to share revenue with major contributors too. > contributors are generally not going to help a for-profit project without themselves getting paid. Contributors already contribute to for-profit open source projects without themselves getting paid. This license would make the situation strictly better for them.

shvedchenko 6y ago

one more article about death of something. if you want people read your article, just yell that something they love is dead. works every time.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
herodoturtle 6y ago
Hah, yes. I'd write an article about VR, entitled: "Death of monitors."

philipswood 6y ago

if only there was a way to make cloud providers charge a per second usage charge for software used... And an open source licence that could support that...

dboreham 6y ago
I've been thinking about this in my spare time for a while, under the working title "General Magic License"+. I think it's a good way (the only way) to reason about the whole "who pays for open source development?" problem. If you can define the terms of that license, and figure out how to get licensors to follow the terms, and copyright owners to license their code under it, then <boom>. Also it may be possible to prove the converse -- that it's impossible to define such a license. Then we can all get back to work on proprietary software, or at least know we're not going to get paid. +Yes, I know.

indymike 6y ago

Self-hosting of software is what is changing. The open-core model is really built around maintaining installations of software on your own hardware (or virtual hardware). "Paying for pro" made sense in that world. With many things you would have installed and maintained on your own hardware moving to a SaaS model and PaaS model, there's really not much of an opportunity to "sell the pro version" outside large enterprises who are 10 years behind the curve. My latest startup owns zero servers. Costs scale on user count (for office stuff) or utilization. Licenses? I get calls from software vendors, and it's hard to even understand what they are selling because I don't buy licenses anymore.

joejoebags 6y ago
I like this article from 2014 that touches on some of the same great points you're making here: https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-want-to-be-the-next-red-hat/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-wa...
- jabl 6y ago
  One thing I recently stumbled upon that struck me was Bryan Cantrill's writeup at http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts-its-midlife-crisis/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts... and https://sfosc.org/docs https://sfosc.org/docs that was linked from that blog post. Quick takeaways about open source business models: - Dual licensing: Well, poison. Who's want to sign away their copyrights so that some company can make a buck? It's essentially proprietary software that also happens to be available open source under some as-tedious-as-possible licensing terms. - Open core: Essentially proprietary software with an open source loss leader. Or for the supermarket chain variant of this business model: "We're opening a new supermarket! Free plastic buckets to the first 1000 customers", causing hours-long queues of people that really want a $2 plastic bucket for free. And as we've seen, it's not much of a protection against big cloud providers with armies of programmers that can easily recreate whatever proprietary juice you have added on top, adapted to their particular environment. - Public goods: Like Linux Foundation projects like the Linux kernel or Kubernetes. Can work, but is not the direct core value of any of the companies participating. Similarly, a company in some other industry may share some code as open source in order to reduce the maintenance burden. - Free software product: The flag bearer being Redhat. Code itself may all be open source, but a company call sell a particular version of it with support, training etc. Might not get the growth numbers and scale that gets VC's excited (as can be seen in the blog post the parent linked to), but can be sustainable.

thayne 6y ago

Redis is given as one of the examples of "open core" failing. But even if you treat the new Redis source available license as completely proprietary, Redis is still open core, since the core is still licensed with BSD 3-clause. It is just that some of the extensions that used to be open source are now proprietary.

zokier 6y ago

I'd say good riddance. Open core to me always felt more "openwashing" than honest attempt to build free software project/community. Part of the feeling arises from the fact that when teenager me first started learning about foss software, Linux, GNU etc one of the things that made such a great impression was that there was no feature gating, no "enterprise editions", nothing locked away. Instead I had all the power in the world on my fingertips. The idea of being built by hackers for hackers to fill their needs resonated to me a lot, not having marketing or product driven development but scratching your own itches. Open core fits very poorly to that worldview. edit: This comment might have started out bit harsh, apologies. I did not mean to imply malice on the companies that tried to make open core work, but rather bit of naivete or misunderstanding regarding open source and building business around that.

macjohnmcc 6y ago
Also commercial entities using these open source products for profit doesn't sound like it would fit either. A commercial entity is not a hacker.

lepikhin 6y ago

Can the license simply have a clause that user is not in Amazon, Microsoft or any public cloud provider?

senko 6y ago
Sure. It wouldn't be open source any longer, tho.
- _puk 6y ago
  There's more than one licence that's open source. Is there a reason that a new style of licence that prevents the "fork and suffocate" approach of these large companies can't be ratified as fitting with core open source values? Being dogmatic about the definition of open source, and not allowing that to evolve over time, feels like hard times ahead.
  - _puk 6y ago
    And just to build on that thought. (IMO) The only people who really care about open source are us, the philanthropic builders of said software. If we shout down those in our community who question the status quo, by simply stating "it's not open source", then we lose those people. Given the hard stance we see on open source, it's very seldom that the reply to that is "but why can't it be". An analogy that springs to mind is jslint (bear with me here..). A great idea that had true belief at heart, but was just too strict for mass adoption. JSLint started a wave of enforcement that was needed, yet the far more flexible jshint (and subsequent eslint) won out in the long run. I'm fully onboard with truly open source, and think there will always be a place for it. But feel that being all or nothing suffocates the discussion.
    - julianmarq 6y ago
      Nothing is stopping you from using your own source available license. Mongo did it, and they're doing okay. It seems like you're arguing something different: You (general you) want the distinction and, more importantly, goodwill that the "open source" label gives you, but without actually having to fit the parameters of "open source".

waynesonfire 6y ago

good for them, developers will just spin up open-source competitors and eat their lunch.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

This seems to me more like another case of "death of a business model caused by revenue maximization strategy". "Open-core" does not have "non-viable" or even "must-be-bait-and-switch" stamped all over it. But if the organization using it decides that its primary goal is revenue maximization (and/or significant growth), then it becomes much more questionable how it will fare. But isn't that the goal of any business, I hear you cry? No, it certainly is not. There are thousands of small businesses even just in the USA that are happy to work within the limitations of their situation and initial desires.

Veen 6y ago
It's not necessarily the organization and its founders who have revenue maximization as a primary goal. The other factor is hundreds of millions of dollars of VC money, and VCs are definitely all about revenue maximization. MapBox has raised quarter of a billion. The conundrum is how does a company develop software as complex as MapBox without relying on VC cash to get the ball rolling.
- joejoebags 6y ago
  Great point. Are there any bootstrapped $1B+ open core companies? There are a surprising number of proprietary ones (e.g. Esri, Mailchimp, etc.)
  - vaibhavgandhi12 6y ago
    Cloudera
Someone 6y ago
So, you’re running a small restaurant, and are fine with it staying small, as long as you can make a living. You publish all your recipes under a permissive license. A restaurant chain starts selling your dishes, using your name, but, because of their scale, cheaper than you can afford to. If you still manage to make money, you may be fine with that, but that’s where the correspondence breaks. In real life, that restaurant chain offers a better product, not because its dishes are better, but because its restaurants are in better locations (have faster network connections), are closer to cinemas and theaters (they offer a zillion other products), etc., and, unlike with restaurants, you can’t make money by branding yourself as “the original”. I don’t see that smaller restaurant staying in business, unless it starts making new recipes it keeps for itself.

sytse 6y ago

In the future contributors might insist on a DCO instead of an CLA so that it is impossible for the project to change from open source to a closed license. Debian insisted on that when switching to GitLab https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-dco-license/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-...

ironmagma 6y ago

As much as I want open source software to be good, commercial software has the inherent advantage of having hierarchies and teams that are all powered by compensation. We could really use some kind of platform in the open source community built around (a) making it easy to fund projects, AND (b) making those projects organizable, with a team lead and contributors.

hpoe 6y ago
Counterpoint to that, all the tools I use most often and am most delighted by are published under a GPL or other FOSS license (Bash, Linux, Emacs, Firefox, Inkscape, etc) whereas the ones I am most constantly frustrated by, angry at, and find the most fault with are closed source proprietary company developed (Anything that starts with MS, VMWare Fusion, etc)
- ironmagma 6y ago
  Firefox is developed by a company with hierarchies. Those other ones have the advantage of being very old and lots of time to iterate on them. Open source produces lots of gems, the problem is that it is very slow moving and IMO the effectiveness is cut in 10 by duplication of effort and lack of coordination. For every successful open source project, there are about 20 stubs and 5-10 less successful open source programs that do basically the same thing.
- wpietri 6y ago
  Agreed. Hierarchies are an advantage only if the people on top of the hierarchy are either unusually right or unusually good at hiring and deferring to people who know better than they do.
diffeomorphism 6y ago
Big questions: Who pays for credit processing, auditing etc.? One platform or many? Are the managing people allowed to make a profit? How do you ensure that important but boring projects get money as well? See the ubuntu software store, elementary OS, patreon/liberapay, .... Edit: Also "commercial" is the wrong word. You mean proprietary. You are very much encouraged to sell free software https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago

But… there's nothing wrong with the business model, no? It's not that they aren't making money by selling an enhanced version of the software, it's that they aren't making as much money as cloud services? Or did I misunderstand?

infoseek12 6y ago

2020 strike again! Seriously though, this article makes some assumptions I’m not sure about. One of them is that Mapbox’s move will be successful. I’m not sure it will be, most users of Mapbox probably won’t upgrade to the new version or will upgrade to whatever fork becomes most popular. In the meantime this is going to make people a lot warier of using them as a tile server and give impetus to their competitors in that market space. It’s quite possible they’ll start to see declining revenues pretty soon. The success of their strategy is tied to the greatly expanded 3D capabilities of version two. It’s really cool and the demos are super sexy but for the vast majority of use cases 2D maps are a better fit. Given the distrust they’ve generated and the massive increase in licensing cost attached to their new model for many customers, there are now some extremely compelling reasons for customers to drop them.

dboreham 6y ago

Who would have guessed? If you give away your product, it's hard to make money.

lacker 6y ago

My interpretation is the opposite. MongoDB is clearly successful - they are a public company worth 16 billion dollars. And they proving the success of the open core business model. For 99% of use cases, MongoDB is open source. You can see the code, you can make modifications, you can use it for free in your business, you can share your changes with others, you can integrate it into your products and services. Yeah, you can't use it if you're working at AWS, but for most people it's just fine. For founders creating new open source companies, it's a great strategy to go the route of MongoDB. Start off open source and sell services. If you run into big enough problems with direct competitors using your own software, you can modify the license to exclude them. This is far better than the status quo in, say, 2010, when the conventional wisdom was that if you're providing a service it shouldn't involve any open source at all.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
julianmarq 6y ago
I'd replace mongo with redis in your comment. Redis truly is open core, but mongo no longer is. Now it's source available, and has been removed from the repos of many distros. Calling mongo open source now just dilutes what "open source" actually means. The organization even removed the submission of its license for approval by the OSI. It's source available, and it's up to each person to decide whether that's good or bad.
- lacker 6y ago
  That’s true, but Redis and MongoDB are at different points in their growth. Redis is worth around 1 billion, and they are still private. I would not be surprised if Redis usage continues to grow, which attracts more competitors, and they eventually shift to a “99% open” model more similar to MongoDB.
- aaron_m04 6y ago
  > Now it's source available, and has been removed from the repos of many distros. I wasn't aware the licensing is more restrictive now.

bradwood 6y ago

Sorry, call me a grammar Nazi, but when I see the word "thusly" when "thus" is perfectly serviceable, I can't be bothered to read any more...

joejoebags 6y ago
Allow me to be at your service: you are a grammar nazi
- joejoebags 6y ago
  how would you prefer that sentence be written?
  - bradwood 6y ago
    s/thusly/thus/

type0 6y ago

I would argue that open core isn't a business model but more of a development strategy.

linuxhansl 6y ago

IMHO "open core" is not a good idea in the first place. Open source is about an open community, open contributions, the multiplier you get from contributions from multiple companies. That way open source is a win-win. Companies benefit from each other's contributions. It's _not_ about just showing the code or a free-for-all. Once you have free and non-free tiers it's already broken. The incentives no longer align. I'm being paid in part to work on the open source projects that we utilize for our service(s). Some of those we started, some of those we're contributing to, but we _own_ none of them. We handed them off to external entities (Apache and others) for governance and we actively encourage others to participate.

nine_k 6y ago
IMHO, free + non-free can be fine, e.g. AGPL + commercial cloud license.
- smichel17 6y ago
  Dual license is different than open core. I would be interested to see if a permissive core with dual-licensed (AGPL+ commercial) extensions would work, for something like GitLab. It's not that big of a step on top of their current model where the proprietary bits are still source-available.
  - BubuIIC 6y ago
    That would be lovely indeed!
  - ameliaquining 6y ago
    Redis is doing this and so far they seem to be doing fine. But it's early.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

nikitaga 6y ago

Are there more promising alternatives to open source funding than open core or charging for associated services like hosting, support, etc.?

jokethrowaway 6y ago

Open source doesn't work and I'm glad the world is starting to understand. It promotes unfair compensation (or lack thereof). If you have the skills to advance technology and no capital to invest to acquire other technical solutions you may need, you can get a job and use that money to pay what Expecting free work from people rarely work, there are just not enough motivated individuals willing to work and maintain something for free. Most open source I rely on is either backed by a giant company which uses it as a way to attract talents (and retain talents, by letting their employee work on their favourite project on company time) or it's unmaintained. If it's unmaintained I either need to do the work myself or hire someone, which introduces a myriad of variables. I'd rather hire the author but often he's busy with his real job and doesn't think he can live off its project. If it wasn't for the OSS movement and the sheer amount of free work we would have a network of company buying OSS solutions and, most likely, more distributed, smaller companies that produce and resell proprietary software.

nine_k 6y ago
Why, open source does work: look at Linux, Webkit, Postgres, LLVM, any programming language with wide adoption, every serious Web framework. But open source does not necessarily mean: - that the bulk of the work is done by people at their leisure, unpaid; - that commercial use for free is necessarily easy or possible; dual licensing has a long history. - that large companies have no interest in maintaining, advancing, financing, or starting open-source projects: currently the opposite is true.
argomo 6y ago
I think you've successfully argued against your own point. With open source, developers are paid for ∆V -- the amount of value added to a project. Companies are paid $0 in most models but it's backed by a monetization model that's non-zero. Basically, more work == more value == more pay. With proprietary software, developers are still paid ∆V, but companies are paid for V∆t -- value times the duration of usage. While some of this is just compensation for risking investor money, the ultimate model is rent-seeking and lock-in. This is extractive because the company keeps getting paid even when they don't add value. You may raise concern that volunteer developers don't get compensation, but use that a problem for a voluntary activity? People program as a hobby, to scratch an itch, to develop mastery, to solve a problem they already have, to advance an ideology, or for a chance at recognition/popularity. Only that last one is anything near a problem, and it's the same boat as first time authors or artists.

LeonidBugaev 6y ago

I work with open-source for the last 8 years, as a business owner and as contributor. There are a lot of people who assume that the biggest value of using open-source project that it is free. Additionally there are a lot of idealists who think about oss as foss. Open-source is not dead, it just trying to find a sustainable model for survival. None of the active OSS projects you know exist without money flow. Even if you have hyped project now, without money it will be dead in a year. More and more companies consider open-source as default option, because there are a better tools right now to make business out of it. And everyone essentially wins from it. Yes, old models of OSS are mostly dead. But new ones are alive more than ever.

smashah 6y ago

As a maintainer of a a relatively tiny "open source" project, I've been going through the same thing over the last few months. People relied on the project, ok let's go open-core 99% is free, a few obscure features require a license key. Now I'm seeing cloud providers built on top of my project with almost no significant changes (other than I guess bypassing my licensing mechanism) and they contribute nothing in terms of support or code. Now I'm building out the cloud service and am slowly moving away from this being an open source project to more like a project that has some code that you can see and a public issue tracker. I have several pitch decks/one pagers ready to go and written up for VCs but have been hesitant due the reasoning in this article. But there is soon coming a time when I will have to pull the trigger and send those emails.

ThePhysicist 6y ago

Open core makes sense if you can provide a "light" version of your product that is already useful, and most professional users of your free product will eventually get into a situation where the "pro" version will save them money or will have a feature they dearly need, so they upgrade. I'm not familiar with Mapbox JS toolkit but maybe the problem was that the free version was too useful already, so only a few of the free users saw the need to upgrade? In that case I can understand why they put it under a commercial license, because providing free support for the project can be a burden.

mauricio 6y ago

I think the business model and the software license often get conflated like this. Once you release software with an open source license, users are free to do what they wish as long as it's within the bounds of the license. Separately comes the business model. If a business intends on selling a hosted version of their product, as most open source database companies seem to want to do, that product needs to compete on its own merits. Can the business truly offer a better hosting experience on someone else's cloud than those cloud providers themselves? I think maybe we conflate the two because we want everything. We want to create open source products that a community contributes to and supports but that only the originating company can monetize. It just doesn't work that way.

coward8675309 6y ago

It's not clear to me that open-source-as-a-business-model was ever vibrant enough that it makes sense to say it has now died. Open-source-as-a-funding-model was surely a thing, but turning open source into a source of consistent and growing free cash flow has been much more rare. At my last start-up the first things to go out the window when we wanted to stop burning money were the commercial Aerospike and Nginx licenses. That was five years ago. The most durable model for commercially-funded open source is as a stratagem for commoditizing someone's complement. If you want to stick it to Apple, fund Android. If you want to stick it to Oracle, fund PostgreSQL. If you want to stick it to Microsoft, fund LibreOffice. If you want to stick it to Sun -- er, Oracle -- fund Linux.

galaxyLogic 6y ago
> turning open source into a source of consistent and growing free cash flow No doubt about that. If you give away the source for free that doesn't produce any cash-flow. If you sell services you sell services. The value-add proposition of "open source companies" I think is they know the software so you can hire them to do things with it, and they can adapt their open source software if needed as they go along. So that is a service-model. Open Source licenses can help companies that do this. Open Source is its own worst enemy. At some point an OS project becomes so GOOD that you don't need to be its developer to use it and adapt it or build Cloud-services around it. Further if they need the expertise of the original developers they can simply hire them. The ethos of open source doesn't forbid you from having an employer. An ethical OS-hacker should be happy getting a salary from whichever company lets him or her write Open Source software. That includes companies like Amazon and Microsoft and IBM who then sell the right to use that software on their Cloud. If this is the correct ethical model then we should not blame Amazon or Google, they do contribute to copyleft Open Source projects. We should blame smaller companies like MongoDB etc. who do not offer "pure" Open Source licenses. So I'm thinking it's not so much the Open Source Business Model that is in crisis. It is the Open Source Ethical Model, which needs to reflect upon itself in the time of Cloud. Is it really more ethical to work for Amazon writing Open Source, than writing Non-Open-Source for a small company which wants to make sure it is not crushed by Amazon?

permille42 6y ago

Post logic: Here is an example of a company taking their software closed sourced after previously being open. Also, AWS. AWS uses the crud out of open source. They admittedly "steal" it in that they fork it internally, applying patches, add UI, and then sell it. They still depend highly on basically all the open source software in the world. That Amazon does this is a rallying call for new licensing schemes. Large monopolistic companies such as Amazon need to be legally shut out of this type of abuse of open source software. So long as we go "It's fine. You have to allow this to truly embrace open source" then we will continue to see Amazon try to shut down all "open core companies" that they can by outright stealing their IP. Open source is not developed primarily by hobbyists or aficionados. Most open source imo comes from closed source projects being open sourced by companies in order to gain free testing, free work ( contributions ), and more market share ( exposure / interest ) Heralding the death of open-source seems like nonsense just to grab attention. I agree that the large companies are trying to crush open-core companies that are small, but it is obvious they are doing this and there will be a backlash from those of us who don't appreciate their meddling.

simonh 6y ago
Let me play devils advocate for a minute. Maybe what Amazon is doing is just fine. If they had to roll all of their services from scratch themselves, they’d be massively more expensive and dramatically less compatible with everything else. The fact that Amazon and many other hosting companies can offer cheap commodity services based on familiar building blocks is a huge benefit to the world enabled by open source. That’s exactly what open source is about, making the world a better place. I’m not entirely convinced by my own argument, but I’m having trouble seeing the world as on the whole a worse place with AWS in it.
- permille42 6y ago
  What Amazon is doing is not fine in any way. Having seen their dev process from the inside it is an absolute nightmare. They give zero shits about the wellfare of their devs nor about their contribution to open source. The only reason they ever release things to open source is to try to get people to use their paid services. Eg: attention. They view open source only as an advertisement and nothing more. The problem isn't that they use open source. It is that they spend a lot of dev times fixing all the bugs and then don't contribute them back upstream. They have sooo many internal patches that should go back but they go "if we contributed them back people wouldn't use our more reliable paid service based on that". They are the exact opposite of the healthy hacker mentality that has brought Linux to the state it is today. Fuck Amazon * 100. The world isn't a better place in any way with them. Their services aren't cheap in any sense. Also, behind the scenes all those services you think are "ultra stable" are actual unstable and flaky as hell. Ask anyone who has worked at Amazon for more than a year and they'll tell you that it is constantly in pants on fire mode. All engineers are required to be on call because they have that many fires every single fucking day.

aazaa 6y ago

Could it be that, rather than the death of a particular variety of open source ("Open Core"), that the author has in fact described yet another open source business model? One that specifically extends Open Core? Consider: - Company releases the Secret Sauce as open source under a highly permissive (non-reciprocal) license - Secret Sauce coalesces a large, engaged community around it - Company pays the bills with support, consulting, and other complementary products/services as it bootstraps itself - Company releases v2 under a traditional non-open license Everyone profits from this arrangement, potentially. Small users get good, free software to bootstrap projects. Big companies build stuff on top. And in the end, Company takes a portion of the open source audience with it into v2. Finding that audience and getting them to pay attention is not easy at all. Think of Open Core as the car that gets you there, to borrow a quote from "The Comeback."

chii 6y ago
What you've described is basically a bait and switch, but worded nicely.
Sophistifunk 6y ago
This is actually a very interesting take on this phenomena I haven't come across before, cheers.

Drdrdrq 6y ago

> Redis adopted a strategy of adding a severely restrictive “commons clause” to updated versions of their existing open source tools,... Severely restrictive? I'm amazed at how bad (undeserved imho) reputation Commons Clause license got. The new Redis tools' license is basically the same, just less clear. The same with MongoDB and MariaDB's licenses. In effect, they all forbid selling to 3rd parties - and yet, being less clear, they are deemed 'OK' while Commons Clause, clear and to the point, is frowned upon. I firmly believe that both proprietary and FOSS licenses are extremes and that a new batch of "cloud protection licenses" will help develop software that will protect core users' freedoms and still allow maintainers to work on in fulltime. Commons Clause was simply ahead of its time - I'm waiting for its descendants to prosper.

jrochkind1 6y ago

I believe this is mis-stating the extent of redis re-licensing. http://antirez.com/news/120 http://antirez.com/news/120 > Today a page about the new Common Clause license in the Redis Labs web site was interpreted as if Redis itself switched license. This is not the case, Redis is, and will remain, BSD licensed. > What is happening instead is that certain Redis modules, developed inside Redis Labs, are now released under the Common Clause (using Apache license as a base license). This means that basically certain enterprise add-ons… That is from a few years ago, but I believe it's still true, and basic redis is still FreeBSD. This isn't a slight of hand where "basic redis core" is open source but not really useful by itself, I think the majority of redis installs have never been using those "enterprise add-ons". I don't think this is necessarily a problem for the author's theory in general, which I am generally sympathetic to as accurately describing something going on in the software world right now, but I think it's misinformation about redis.

TAForObvReasons 6y ago
Redis core is still BSD-3-Clause https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/6.0/COPYING https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/6.0/COPYING But it doesn't change the essence of the argument posited by the author. The redis modules in question were originally AGPL. Redis Labs relicensed them to Apache+Commons Clause. Both Redis Labs and Mongo reacted to pressure by relicensing software.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  But then redis is essentially still the "open core" model he is saying is dead. I agree it doesn't really disprove his general story (which I agree is a trend), it doesn't have to be universal to be a trend, a very strong trend even, there can be special unusual circumstances behind redis, or it can just not yet have succumbed but be on the way, or it can just be an unexplained exception to a strong trend. It just makes redis not a great example to choose, and it makes his article misleading giving people the wrong idea about what's going on with redis.
hodgesrm 6y ago
What's "going on in software" is that most businesses don't want to devote a lot of resources to operating software themselves in the cloud. If you sell popular software and don't provide a cloud service, you are basically opening up an opportunity for somebody else to do it. Public clouds tend to jump on this because it sells underlying infrastructure in addition to the management value add. OSS companies like Mongo, DataBricks, and Confluent run popular cloud services. They all seem to be doing fine for this reason. I don't see a lot of proof that changing their licensing was a root cause of their success.

danbmil99 6y ago

I don't think anyone should have a realistic expectation of making money directly from an open source project. You have to be strategic and tactical in how you approach the problem of monetizing. If you don't do it, someone like Amazon will. If you want to make that difficult or impossible, use a copyleft license. The choice of a permissive license implies things that you have to think about upfront.

SergeAx 6y ago

It is not a "cloud" that damages open core projects, it is Wal-Martesque cloud providers. If you are buying lots of infrastructure from AWS, there's just no reason to buy MongoDB or Redis from their creators: you would just put more load on your accounting, monitoring and cost controlling and will have nothing extra in return, except pride for supporting open source. There is an interesting model at Google cloud, where I can deploy and use a Grafana stack for moderate $50/month. Looks like Grafana gets a solid chunk of these money - they are advertising it on their own website.

open-source-ux 6y ago

There never was an open-source business model. Among the thousands of open-source projects, the ones championed as a successful business make a tiny proportion i.e. the exception not the norm. Meanwhile the SaaS business model continues to eat the software market. A model that gives users less control than the desktop software model. Open-source software has been critical to the success of the SaaS model. You could argue SaaS is the true success of the 'open-source business model'. Just not the way open-source advocates expected it to be.