4 ms·

Food on the table while giving away source code

37 points by nixcraft 6y ago

keyle 6y ago
That was an interesting read. As a developer working on my own product nearing completion, I'm really at a point where I wonder if going open source would help legitimise my product, while offering a SaaS (openSaaS format); or would it be my downfall... - If the software just works, why would someone pay for support? - If the software is easy to install, why would someone pay for the hosted SaaS? Though decisions.
- ddek 6y ago
  Hosted has two benefits: the host assumes liability, and the host takes on all admin costs. This is why it’s a mistake to compete on price in the SaaS game. It’s not about small orgs self hosting, they wouldn’t pay you much anyway. A large organisation just wants someone to point a finger at, and for a large fee you can be that person.
  - keyle 6y ago
    Thanks for that but I'm not entirely sure why you said this. Could you elaborate and is this pointing towards opensaas as a better choice?
    - ddek 6y ago
      I’m always biased in favour of opensaas. If you go opensaas, your customers would need motivation before they started paying. Opensaas isn’t going to guarantee that your product succeeds. Going closed won’t either. I’m trying to say that if you go opensaas, you should focus on high value customers. The strongest argument for that group is liability. Opensaas viability is like a natural monopoly. It’s all about barrier to entry. If a hosted instance is painless to configure, and is fully featured and resilient, then the model won’t work. If proper administration is an experts job, then it is viable.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  The article describes the support model for curl. The business model for MySQL pre-Sun was 1/1,000 companies paid for licenses, and several companies paid $43,000/year for unlimited support tickets (including Netflix.) Yahoo also paid $40,000 for the initial replication support (for W - E HA.) For your case, there's 2 forks: 1) If it's a non-developer-specific tool, then small businesses will automatically use your SaaS product over installing an Open Source distro and managing it themselves. To understand why this is so, remember a large program you wrote. Then imagine re-implementing in a language you don't know, like Haskell or Scala. Feel the pain of doing something strange? A possible exception is if you provide a free Docker image that "just works", then that could cannibalize your business. 2) If it's a developer-specific tool, then Open Sourcing it might work, or it might not work. In the case of MySQL, 1/1,000 sales worked well-enough for them. For curl, it took 10 billion installs to support one person. :) The counterexample is programmer editors, which developers pay for but don't expect source code. (Brief and JetBrains made millions.)
Havoc 6y ago
He’s almost too cautious with his monetization I think That send it’s not really a tool that lends itself to it
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
So a project with billions of installations is able to fund one developer. I rely on a lot of open source and have created a few small projects. None the less I have a nagging feeling that open source is devaluing the work of programmers.
- chii 6y ago
  It's not devaluing the work, any more than Einstein's theory of relativity being used in GPS (but not paying his estate/family) is devaluing the work. The value of curl is not being captured by the creators of curl. The value being captured by the users of curl means that more value was generated every time someone uses curl. The act of capturing value is not frictionless, and having the value be captured can mean that the value is not generated in the first place.

37 points by nixcraft 6y ago

That was an interesting read. As a developer working on my own product nearing completion, I'm really at a point where I wonder if going open source would help legitimise my product, while offering a SaaS (openSaaS format); or would it be my downfall... - If the software just works, why would someone pay for support? - If the software is easy to install, why would someone pay for the hosted SaaS? Though decisions.

ddek 6y ago
Hosted has two benefits: the host assumes liability, and the host takes on all admin costs. This is why it’s a mistake to compete on price in the SaaS game. It’s not about small orgs self hosting, they wouldn’t pay you much anyway. A large organisation just wants someone to point a finger at, and for a large fee you can be that person.
- keyle 6y ago
  Thanks for that but I'm not entirely sure why you said this. Could you elaborate and is this pointing towards opensaas as a better choice?
  - ddek 6y ago
    I’m always biased in favour of opensaas. If you go opensaas, your customers would need motivation before they started paying. Opensaas isn’t going to guarantee that your product succeeds. Going closed won’t either. I’m trying to say that if you go opensaas, you should focus on high value customers. The strongest argument for that group is liability. Opensaas viability is like a natural monopoly. It’s all about barrier to entry. If a hosted instance is painless to configure, and is fully featured and resilient, then the model won’t work. If proper administration is an experts job, then it is viable.
redis_mlc 6y ago
The article describes the support model for curl. The business model for MySQL pre-Sun was 1/1,000 companies paid for licenses, and several companies paid $43,000/year for unlimited support tickets (including Netflix.) Yahoo also paid $40,000 for the initial replication support (for W - E HA.) For your case, there's 2 forks: 1) If it's a non-developer-specific tool, then small businesses will automatically use your SaaS product over installing an Open Source distro and managing it themselves. To understand why this is so, remember a large program you wrote. Then imagine re-implementing in a language you don't know, like Haskell or Scala. Feel the pain of doing something strange? A possible exception is if you provide a free Docker image that "just works", then that could cannibalize your business. 2) If it's a developer-specific tool, then Open Sourcing it might work, or it might not work. In the case of MySQL, 1/1,000 sales worked well-enough for them. For curl, it took 10 billion installs to support one person. :) The counterexample is programmer editors, which developers pay for but don't expect source code. (Brief and JetBrains made millions.)

Havoc 6y ago

He’s almost too cautious with his monetization I think That send it’s not really a tool that lends itself to it

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

So a project with billions of installations is able to fund one developer. I rely on a lot of open source and have created a few small projects. None the less I have a nagging feeling that open source is devaluing the work of programmers.

chii 6y ago
It's not devaluing the work, any more than Einstein's theory of relativity being used in GPS (but not paying his estate/family) is devaluing the work. The value of curl is not being captured by the creators of curl. The value being captured by the users of curl means that more value was generated every time someone uses curl. The act of capturing value is not frictionless, and having the value be captured can mean that the value is not generated in the first place.