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Open source is not a business model. You can make money in open source, but not by accident. You have to find a viable business which incorporates open source.

Open source is not a business model. You can make money in open source, but not by accident. You have to find a viable business which incorporates open source. One common approach is SaaS, where the software is open source and you provide value by selling hosted versions, with paid support, competing on the reliability and utility of your infrastructure, expertise of your support staff, and integrity of your business.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
>ne common approach is SaaS, where the software is open source and you provide value by selling hosted versions, with paid support, competing on the reliability and utility of your infrastructure, expertise of your support staff, and integrity of your business The big problem with this is that most of the large enterprises which are really spending the money for this, 99% of the time are going to pick Amazon or Microsoft or IBM for hosting/support over AwesomeOpenSourceLibrary LLC, especially since they likely already have contracts with those companies. From a practical point of view, if I have N open source libraries that I use in production, as a large company, it is better for me if I have Amazon support all N libraries, than having N different contracts with N different companies for support/hosting.
- ddevault 6y ago
  It's not that hard to compete with AWS. AWS is scatterbrained and provides a really bad UX and as-is integrations where the "is" is not great. You might lose some business to them, but the cases we've seen lately aren't that: Elastic cleared almost half a billion dollars last year. What open source does mean is surrendering your monopoly over what you build. Amazon may capture some of your value as a result, but that's part of the deal. I wrote about it here: https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your-monopoly.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...
  - andor 6y ago
    "It's not that hard to compete with AWS. AWS is scatterbrained and provides a really bad UX and as-is integrations where the "is" is not great." A lot of enterprise buying decisions come down to: "AWS/Azure/... is already an approved vendor, so let's just buy from them instead of going through the hoops to get Elastic approved". The "super scalers" are offering a path of least resistance that is difficult to overcome.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

>ne common approach is SaaS, where the software is open source and you provide value by selling hosted versions, with paid support, competing on the reliability and utility of your infrastructure, expertise of your support staff, and integrity of your business The big problem with this is that most of the large enterprises which are really spending the money for this, 99% of the time are going to pick Amazon or Microsoft or IBM for hosting/support over AwesomeOpenSourceLibrary LLC, especially since they likely already have contracts with those companies. From a practical point of view, if I have N open source libraries that I use in production, as a large company, it is better for me if I have Amazon support all N libraries, than having N different contracts with N different companies for support/hosting.

ddevault 6y ago
It's not that hard to compete with AWS. AWS is scatterbrained and provides a really bad UX and as-is integrations where the "is" is not great. You might lose some business to them, but the cases we've seen lately aren't that: Elastic cleared almost half a billion dollars last year. What open source does mean is surrendering your monopoly over what you build. Amazon may capture some of your value as a result, but that's part of the deal. I wrote about it here: https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your-monopoly.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...
- andor 6y ago
  "It's not that hard to compete with AWS. AWS is scatterbrained and provides a really bad UX and as-is integrations where the "is" is not great." A lot of enterprise buying decisions come down to: "AWS/Azure/... is already an approved vendor, so let's just buy from them instead of going through the hoops to get Elastic approved". The "super scalers" are offering a path of least resistance that is difficult to overcome.