13 ms·

Open source is not a business model (2018)

186 points by JNRowe 6y ago

phkahler 6y ago
Open source sits alongside Free Software. Free Software as defined by the FSF is software that respects the users freedom. Freedom to use, copy, modify... They do say you can charge for it, but never claim it's a good business strategy. Consulting. Services. Education. Those seem like words that might let you make money. You can attach "open source" to those words but it obviously doesnt stand on it's own as a business model.
- varispeed 6y ago
  The big problem is that there is no distinction between an individual user, SME or a big corporation. The create grounds for exploitation of software developers, social divide and other unintended consequences. The promotion of open source by big corporations is cheaper in the long run that spending money on R&D, salaries, taxes as there is always going to be a good enough project for such corporation to appropriate and make money off of, without having to pay anything to contributors.
- bartread 6y ago
  > Consulting. Services. Education. Those seem like words that might let you make money. And that's cool but to a very great degree these often boil down to an exchange of time for money (unless by services you mean SaaS which is really just a product business with a different revenue model). You can make a living but you're on a treadmill that you can't ever really afford to get off of, and it doesn't really scale other than by adding more people. I mean it's OK, don't get me wrong - it's certainly better than a kick in the balls - and you can make a decent living from it. But I don't find it particularly appealing: I'd much rather be involved in creating products that you can sell over and over again. And, if what you've created is of value to others, why shouldn't you charge them a fee to use it? (Btw, I'd also add paid support to your list but, again, I wouldn't want to build a business heavily based around providing support because support can really wear you down - or at least it can really wear me down. It's absolutely necessary, but not something I find at all enjoyable.)
  - jstanley 6y ago
    > And, if what you've created is of value to others, why shouldn't you charge them a fee to use it? You can, but you probably won't succeed if it's open source, because people can share it around freely without your consent.
    - amelius 6y ago
      There is a middle way: license your software so that big players with more than (say) $1M revenue will have to pay for the development of the software, while the small guy can use the free version. > because people can share it around freely without your consent. The nice thing about this approach is that big players like FAANG can't really get around it. But it doesn't matter since your software is probably already a bargain for them (all these big companies are essentially built on open source).
    - mids_hn 6y ago
      Another approach is a source-available license. The one I'm interested in would be one, where viewing, modifying, recompiling the source is allowed, but redistribution is allowed only to those who had bought the license from all owners of the source and it's modifications. It would produce a nice "waterfall" effect. It wouldn't be open-source nor free software, but most people don't really need limitless redistribution, and the source would be proof that said software isn't malicious.
  - jiofih 6y ago
    Aka commercial software. Nothing wrong with it indeed! Just don’t package it with a weird “open” license and pretend it’s OSS. You can dual license if needed and deal with the consequences.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    The real treadmill is the current monetary system. Even if you make a product, but revenue doesn't grow at least 15-20% YoY (the rate of money printing last year), its value is shrinking over time.
    - 6y ago
hdkekbro 6y ago
Who are these imaginary foes who are presenting their business model to investors with simply the words “Open Source” on a single slide?
- taylorwc 6y ago
  Early stage investor here. You’d be shocked. It’s extremely en vogue to start a company and have your value prop be “open source alternative to X,” without any regard for whether there is actually any logic to something being open source.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    Most absurd open source alternative you have been pitched?
    - taylorwc 6y ago
      I’d feel a little bad calling any out bc it’s usually not too hard to figure it out if I gave that info even without a name :)
      - bdcravens 6y ago
        I'll read between the lines and assume that means you've heard some pretty absurd ones.
        taylorwc 6y ago
        Haha I mean nothing that was obviously ridiculous, like “Applebee’s, but open source” or something. It was more just really hand-wavy logic around why their product needed something open source, with no really compelling answer.
        mcbits 6y ago
        I think "because everything should be open source" is a fine answer to why something should be open source, even if it doesn't answer the different and more important question about how the company will make money.
walrus01 6y ago
I pretty much stopped taking this seriously after they compared restaurants to software development. Restaurants have very different operating cost structures.
- II2II 6y ago
  The article's point is the product is not the business model, and the author did not try to stretch the point by comparing open source software business models to culinary business models. I suspect the example was selected since many people aspire to open their own restaurant even though they know (or ought to know) the failure rate is atrociously high.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    COVID-19 enters the chat.
rapnie 6y ago
The mentioned Redhat article Part 2 is a 404. Here's the archived version: "How to Make Money from Open Source Platforms, Part 2: Open Core vs. Hybrid Business Models" https://archive.is/Yhr8l https://archive.is/Yhr8l
SteveNuts 6y ago
24 hour/365 production support is a requirement for large companies, sell that. Putting features behind a paywall doesn't work when the entire business can be forked and those features implemented for free. See AWS with Elasticsearch. There's a reason enterprises use MSSQL, Oracle, etc.
- FearlessNebula 6y ago
  If I understand this correctly, you're saying companies choose to license paid databases like Microsoft SQL or Oracle over open source SQL databases for support. What kind of support do companies need for a database? I can't figure out this error message my query generates or how can I update to the next version of your DB? Something along those lines?
  - hvasilev 6y ago
    if there is a sufficiently large issue with the product itself, the vendor is monetarily incentivised to fix it asap. I personally have no expectation of that for free / os software.
    - silvestrov 6y ago
      > sufficiently large issue My experience is that for 99% companies there is absolutely no way to be "sufficiently large" for Oracle to take notice of any bugs/problems with their SQL database. As you don't have the source, there is no way to get the problem fixed. With open source software you can go on the market and hire one of the developers or an independent contractor.
      - ab_testing 6y ago
        I think it depends on the type of Oracle product that you are implementing. Having implemented Oracle packaged products for a long time (ERP, OBIEE etc.), there are hundreds of known bugs in each of the modules. In fact, many times, new clients comb through the bug reports before implementing a new module to check if a listed feature has a bug.
bombcar 6y ago
Open Source isn’t a business model but it CAN be a support model - for the right market the number of companies who will be willing to fund features/fixes that the company can’t be bothered to get noticeable. It can also be shown as a “backup” - if we fail you have the source and can continue to maintain it.
- kevincox 6y ago
  "backup" is one of the main reasons I prefer open source. Even if it is funded by one company now (and I pay them) there is some sort of continuum plan if they go bust. I am not immediately screwed and I can consider options such as self-maintenance, forks or a migration. This also applies if they change the terms or price.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    The amount of monkey-patching I've done to production systems where I don't even have the code (Java is great for this) is immense.
    - laurent92 6y ago
      I personally believe Java wouldn’t have been successful 5 years earlier, during the time when everyone was encrypting their code. It was an inacceptable trade-off before Internet. After internet, most software is partly online anyway.
  - laurent92 6y ago
    Maintenance is a really good point, but we haven’t found a way to monetize it. If I gave my software as OSS to paid customers, I’d immediately lose most of my other sales and give my little implementation secrets to my competitors. I’d like to be able to say “And for +15%, get the source and ability to compile and fix forever”. And not lose my business in the process.
    - bombcar 6y ago
      You don’t have to use a true open source license- simply a “shared source” or something with a clause making it BSD when the business ceases operations or similar.
matsemann 6y ago
It's really common for Launc HNs, though. This search shows many just the last two months: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22launch%20HN%22%20open%20source&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (with some false positives) Amusingly, two variants of "open source Datadog" the same week. Are these kind of OS copies successful in YC context? They are apparently getting accepted.
f430 6y ago
Open source is as sustainable as a closed business model in some sectors as long as you are willing to be creative. I've invested/funded/donated to several OS projects. I don't really expect to make money in most. I do it for the same reason I give large tips time to time. Somebody has to do it because the value they are providing is IMMENSE. I ask nothing in return. I give without really thinking about maximizing profit. The way I see it is that when you give to good cause the universe will reward you in ways you don't expect. I encourage others who are successful to give to OS projects especially folks who work on projects full time with little to no way of supporting themselves because they can't memorize graph algorithms or do whiteboard interviews or neurally diverse. As much as I have gripes with Github as a corporate entity, it's platform does serve a useful purpose in that it facilitates the movement of capital to OS projects.
- ivanche 6y ago
  I applaud you sir! I started doing something similar one year ago - at the beginning of each month I donate a few $ to one of free/open source projects I use (and every month it's another project that receives donation). I know that one donation won't change author's life, but if enough people do it regularly...
Railsify 6y ago
It's often used as a marketing model.
throwawaymanbot 6y ago
Always with the Open-source is not a business model garbage. Its time to realize that the English Language is not a business model either. But from it a lot of economic activity is spawned by it, and created through it. The same with open-source.
cblconfederate 6y ago
Unfortunately it is a marketing term now, or new age jargon crap like "dont be evil"
dalbasal 6y ago
Kind of Meta: The meaning of "business model," in a software/startup context is somewhat quaint: “All it really meant was how you planned to make money.” "Model" seems grandiose for a word that could be simplified to "income source." Comparisons to restaurants tend to be strained. Restaurant "business models" are not generally that complicated: People pay restaurants for food. Some deliver. The reason software people contemplate business models and restaurateurs don't is that "software," regardless of licensing, doesn't come with a standard business model. Every one is a snowflake. In software, "business model" is a wide range of possibilities. Most of them failing. Many quitely succeeding. A few explosively winning. Is AirBnB a software business model? Is Adwords? Even MSFT, which does literally exchange software for money... MSFT's "business model" is a complicated, impossible to replicate thing. The majority of software that's literally exchanged for money is done with some sort of services/support bundled in... and the customer is a business. If I give it away then why do people buy it?" is not even a sensible question. What does that question mean for Google, Apple or Amazon? There are plenty of exceptions: Photoshop, MS office... but even these are becoming online services and the "business model" is less directly "software for cash." TLDR, software doesn't have a standard business model regardless. Weighted by revenue share, the vast majority of software revenue comes from advertising, luxury electronics, web services or some other "business model" that isn't contradicted by OS in any way. "Selling software" in a sandwich-4-cash comparable way is surprisingly rare, regardless of license.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  > Every [software business] is a snowflake. As much as I appreciate this comment, it's less limited to software than you paint it to be. When you start digging into how businesses actually make money, you quickly realize it's rarely what it seems. Many gas stations that are wildly successful, such as Sheetz and Wawa, don't make their money selling gas, they make it selling food using gas as a commodity to get the customer in the door. Likewise, McDonald's doesn't really make its money selling food either, although this is a lot more complicated and heavily involves real estate and franchising. In other words, nothing is really as it seems when you peel back the veneer. Software just happens to be relatively new and is poorly understood by most people.
hvasilev 6y ago
There are a million ways in which your business can go belly up, there is so much that can go wrong at any point. I see these open source startups and I just cannot fathom how clueless MOST of these people need to be to build their businesses around an ideology. I guess if you start from a very specific strategy and you make sure that the FREE/OSS route is the optimal for the sake of your business, it can make sense. Honestly if this happens to me, I would probably get discouraged by the track record of such companies, and just backtrack into a model with a better one, in order to give my business the best possible chance.
sunstone 6y ago
Oh yes it is. But like most products it has its market segment. And that segment is a group that requires a certain function that is not a competitive advantage for any in the group and wants to get that function for the lowest possible cost. Ok, so much for abstractions. A stark example is that on Microsoft's Azure the majority of VM's are running Linux. A lot of companies want cloud based VM's and they don't want to pay for Microsoft's OS to run them when they can use Linux for free, so they don't. Another example is OpenStreetMap. Many companies (including Apple) spend millions a year upgrading openstreetmaps. A lot of companies need a mapping function but it's silly for each one to carry the burden of creating their own map when they can all pitch in and use the final result. This is the market segment where Open Source makes sense.
- rrdharan 6y ago
  These are use cases and examples where open source makes sense, not a business (i.e. sustainable profit) model.
abetusk 6y ago
I would encourage people to read the article. VM Brasseur has a click-baity title, which is fine, but the point they are making is actually a bit more subtle. I'll quote from the article: > There is a great number of potential business models, but “open source” is not one of them. It is, instead, one of the many tools that can be employed in order to make a selected business model work as expected. > Therefore open source ... does not ... concern itself with business any more than food concerns itself with business. If there is a business that has a business model that is not living up to expectations, and if that business model uses open source as one if its tools, it’s illogical to blame open source for the failure. The gist of the article isn't "open source and business are incompatible", rather, it's saying "don't blame open source for a failure of your business". VM Brasseur focuses on open core specifically, a subset of an "open source business strategy", talking about what kind of expectations one should have engaging in that strategy, pointing to John Mark Walker's post on "How to Make Money from Open Source Platforms" [0]. As an aside, I would like to point out that there are successes in some businesses pursuing an "open source" strategy, for a broader form of open source, either using open source as a key feature or because the technology was open sourced, abandoned and picked up by someone else. Arduino [1] comes to mind, where they used the open sourced Arduino platform, the IDE, the libraries and the open source hardware schematic and boards, that was essentially abandoned by the original creators and picked up by Massimo Banzi and David Mellis. There were other factors to Arduino's success, such as focusing on artists and educators, there being a need for a cheap, accessible electronics/microcontroller platform, selling physical devices and various other economic factors that went into making the business viable, etc., so maybe I'm being overly pedantic and not really contradicting VM Brasseur's claim. In case people don't know, VM Brasseur is a big proponent of open source and has written a book called "Forge Your Future With Open Source" [2] and is in the process of writing a new book about "FOSS strategy in business" [3]. [0] https://www.linux.com/news/how-make-money-open-source-platforms/ https://www.linux.com/news/how-make-money-open-source-platfo... [1] https://arduinohistory.github.io/ https://arduinohistory.github.io/ [2] https://pragprog.com/titles/vbopens/forge-your-future-with-open-source/ https://pragprog.com/titles/vbopens/forge-your-future-with-o... [3] https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2021/03/19/coming-soon-a-new-book-about-foss-strategy-in-business https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2021/03/19/coming-soon-...
- 6y ago
eye8one2 6y ago
Whats up with all the opensource hate on here lately? Has Bill Gates secretly bought this site or something? (User was shadow banned for this post)
- detaro 6y ago
  in what way is this "opensource hate"?
  - bdcravens 6y ago
    It's not. It's a useful discussion about the pragmatic limitation of open source.
- nadspoly 6y ago
  Maybe the pandemic made people realise affording food and stuff for your work is nice but open source doesn't come near that except a lucky few.
  - detaro 6y ago
    Same question to you: how is this "opensource hate"?
ce385 6y ago
A 100%. We try to make as much as possible of our online video editor (www.typestudio.co) free of charge and try to be as transparent as possible in our communication. But with open source we could never raise a seed round.
bdcravens 6y ago
Baseball is not a business model either.
zouhair 6y ago
Baking bread is not a business model, a bakery on the other hand.
- pvorb 6y ago
  A bakery is a business. Selling the bread to consumers in a shop is the business model.
- timwaagh 6y ago
  What about Inspiring Young Aspiring Bakers to bake bread for free so we can all have free bread? Is that a business model?
JoelJacobson 6y ago
Open Source = the “Atoms” in Our “Digital Periodic Table” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26604020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26604020
kemitchell 6y ago
Straw Man I've seen "not a business model" quipped a hundred times, as if that ends whatever debate is going on. I've yet to see anyone actually argue that open source actually is a business model, as opposed to having their argument bent that way. The author doesn't link to any examples. Who are they browbeating? I don't see MongoDB arguing that the meaning of open source should address financial incentives for developers, either. I see them arguing that open source copyleft can be strong enough to demand openness from their competitors, as GPL would have in the packaged-software era. Mongo have a financial concern, but exactly to the author's point about means versus ends, they're not trying to write their business into any definition. They're reading the definition to cover a license that works for their business. If open source didn't concern itself with business, it wouldn't exist. The whole pitch was to business. Cathedral and the Bazaar was a marketing manual for selling manager-types. O'Reilly bankrolled events and meetings. Early on in OSI history, they readily approved several stronger copyleft licenses for specific businesses. MPL. Sleepycat. QPL. IPL. RPL. Arguably AGPL. That's the history. JMW does say there hasn't been a successful open core product, but he defines success as "ubiquity in the modern data center". In business, there's plenty of success between irrelevance and market domination. Ferraris and fast chargers aren't ubiquitous in modern garages. What I see here is that open source is a business model to some interested parties. That model is add-on services---integration, customization, support, hosting---and no other. Never mind that dual licensing, open core, delayed release, and others existed well before RedHat and WordPress and IBM successes made headlines. Never mind that these models had their business standard bearers, too. Never mind that they sometimes offered support documentation or configurations for hosting that add-on service companies didn't. The difference now is that the anti-commercial, permissive-focused, "open source means I never hear 'no'" faction view happens to correspond to the interests of the titans of industry, who are all cloud services companies. These companies want to commoditize their complements---"open source" means we can reap what you sow and sell it to our customers---but not the proprietary code they use to differentiate their clouds. They patronize the big open source foundations. We shouldn't be asking what open source is or means, as if it's an end in itself. We should be asking what it's for. And accepting there was never any conflict-free consensus there. We brushed all that under a rug in the late 1990s and early 2000s, because there was fame and money and a sense of purpose to be had selling "open source" as a brand and a "revolution". Now that work is done, the victorious allies are squabbling again. So it goes.
jarrell_mark 6y ago
Open source tends to be used as a user acquisition strategy for companies in the growth stage not worrying about monetization. Once they get to the stage of trying to monetize their newfound userbase, they rethink the value of releasing their product as open source.
slap_shot 6y ago
SaaS is out sourced IT. Plenty of SaaS could open source their entire code base and it would have little effect on sales; people would gladly still pay for it to be hosted. In some categories, having the code open source helps gain adoption early in the process. So yes, open source is not a business model, but plenty of open source software is monetized these days.
- xupybd 6y ago
  Very true, also it's a way of sucking people in. I run a few servers at work, hosting non critical services, such as password management, wiki and other things that aren't used by many in the org. The day those get used by more than a few people we will go paid SAAS as I don't have the time or mandate to provide 24/7 support.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > SaaS is out sourced IT. Plenty of SaaS could open source their entire code base and it would have little effect on sales; people would gladly still pay for it to be hosted. The problem is that with open source, anybody can be the SaaS provider and make the money from the open source software. In fact, companies will be more willing to go with either the bigger names or providers they have existing contracts with, than a small open source company. SaaS inherently favors the larger corporations.
- musicale 6y ago
  > SaaS > plenty of open source software is monetized these days One of the most successful models has been to take open source software that someone else wrote, add your own proprietary extensions and enhancements, and sell it as a service. Some of the most appealing aspects of open source for businesses are potentially reduced labor costs (because much of the software development work will be either done for free or paid for by others) and faster time to market (because much or most of the engineering work has already been done.)
adamlangsner 6y ago
It is not a business model. But it is a good communication and branding strategy
blueyes 6y ago
Open source is to software makers what Groupon is to restaurants: a way to get people in the door, but many of those people are not, and will never become, the customers you seek. Every open source business sells something else, often a solution to its own complexity, such as managed instances.
- offtop5 6y ago
  You hit the nail on the head, I think ghost blog is relatively easy to set up, but for $9 a month and you'll handle my hosting and my ssl certs, and most people with a bit of disposable income are fine with paying that. I just spent $80 on a nice meal and a couple of drinks, if my blog is anything like an income source I'll have no problem with spending $100 a month for someone to manage it for me. I would still advise students, and other new developers to go through the motions of hosting things themselves via AWS or whatever. If you can get a Ubuntu instance on ec2 to run a public facing website you probably can walk into a tech company and get an entry level job. It's not necessarily hard to learn how to do these things, it's just tedious. Avoiding the tedious drama is how open source companies make money
  - mraza007 6y ago
    I totally agree with your comment and you gave a great analogy
seoaeu 6y ago
What this article misses is the presence of bad faith actors who make billions from open source but studiously work to prevent even a small amount of that flowing back to the companies that wrote the software. Kind of like the difference between a restaurant failing because they can't get enough customers vs. failing because people keep robbing them.
- tybit 6y ago
  This is a bad faith analogy, others profiting from OSS they didn’t write themselves is a feature not a bug. Stealing from a restaurant is not.
  - seoaeu 6y ago
    Others profiting at the expense of the authors is not a desired feature. A necessary consequence of the current OSS regime perhaps, but not desired. The definitions written down decades ago don't have to be the final say. I chose the example of stealing from a restaurant precisely because if that were happening, people would call for legal changes to prevent it. Which proves it is sometimes worthwhile to make legal changes to protect value creating enterprises. The only question is whether or how the same should be done for OSS.
mch82 6y ago
Open source is an implementation strategy for closing a business model. Strategic use of open source can move a business model from a money loser to a money maker. It can be extremely strategic to use source components in the supply chain of a software product. Using open source components allows the engineering team (if one is needed at all) to focus on the unique parts of the project. This can reduce development/maintenance costs and timelines. It can also make up for missing skills on a business team. Facebook did this with Open Compute Project. It can also be strategic to release parts of a product as open source. For example, releasing a database, OS, or framework as open source can establish an industry standard, improve brand awareness, quality, and make it easier to hire new talent. Basecamp did this with Rails. Google did this with Android. Open source can also commoditize a market segment to a point where large companies that might otherwise compete choose not to. WhatsApp did this with Erlang and their initial messaging stack. However, if you’re releasing 100% of your intellectual property & technology as open source then you might attract enough attention to get funding, but you probably don’t have a business model.
- hda111 6y ago
  I don’t agree with reduced maintenance cost because all internal patches must be ported to newer versions of the component all the time.
  - hansvm 6y ago
    It's quite possible for that workload to still be cheap relative to writing it yourself from scratch (e.g., I wouldn't think twice about vendoring git-subrepo). That said, if incorporating upstream changes is more expensive than writing it yourself then...just fork the project and write new changes yourself. It's definitely possible that the project isn't a good fit and that you'd be better off starting from scratch than starting from an open-source base, but that dimension is orthogonal to the question of ongoing maintenance cost.
  - mch82 6y ago
    The concern you raise is a valid & important to consider. I’ve seen situations where there’s a mismatch between the update schedule of a component and the update schedule of the larger project & it creates an issue.
Xisiqomelir 6y ago
Do we expect copyright licenses to be business models too? Does anyone?
crvdgc 6y ago
The author linked to a wikipedia page[0] for examples of viable business models, and it interestingly includes "Professional Open-source Model" without explanation. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_model#Examples https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_model#Examples
cryptonector 6y ago
I've been saying this forever. Open source is just a tool. It's a tool you use to attract customers who want it, or employees who want it, or whatever. It's not a product though, and it's not a sustainable business model. The choice of license you use too is a business tool. Consortia are about the only successful open source business model. The most successful such consortium is the SQLite Consortium, which clearly makes D.R. Hipp and his team very happy. One key to SQLite's business success was keeping the best testsuite for it closed source, which makes it extremely difficult to fork the project, or even to contribute to it, which leaves the team as essential to those who depend on SQLite (which includes a lot of FAANG).
- ozim 6y ago
  No, open source is not a tool. Open source should be the default mode of operations. It is not some kind of "can opener" to get people who might be interested in your product. Most of the software does not use "magic algorithms" that no one else cannot think of. Power of people and companies should rise from trust and professional behavior. Well it might be that there really is some magic algorithm but if someone who I cannot trust is providing that algorithm I am probably better off not using it anyway. I am willing to pay to someone who I can trust that he will do proper work, he does not have to be a "mastermind". He does not have to have some magic tricks up in his sleeve. Remember that trust and professional behavior beat any "magic algorithm" in the long run anyway. By having open source company/person is signaling that they also rely on trust, but don't use is cynically, please.
nanoscopic 6y ago
The ultimate dream of open source is for all software to become open source. Open source need not mean that the development of the software in question wasn't paid for. The ideal is one of concrete socialism. To share the results of the labor and to continually improve rather than everyone constantly redoing the same work. Open source may not be a business model but it can certainly be viewed as an idealistic vision for software development as a whole. I am wary of anything that makes absolute statements such as the one in this article: "no successful product has come from an open core company" The article quotes it and seems to agree with it. It is absolute rubbish. There are a good number of successful open core products.
w3news 6y ago
It's just where you build software for. Of software isn't your main product, just needed so you can better make your main product, than open source software can be very helpful for you. It's a nice way to help each other, and it doesn't change your profit. But if software is your main product, than is open source very hard to pay your bills. Also if you build software for a company, very few will pay for something that will be shared to everybody. But I know a hospital that pay to write software for some hardware on Linux, and share it as open source so all hospitals that use that hardware with Linux can use it. That is helping other people if you have solve a problem. Buy indeed, open source isn't a business model, but a way of life.
pritambarhate 6y ago
yes, open source is not a business model, it's a marketing model. All these startups (MongoDB, Elastic, etc.) they used open source like that only. A very good marketing model. These change of terms is also a marketing model. Now the slogan is: It's still open source for everyone, except for AWS!
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Open source is certainly one way to do marketing, particularly developer marketing. I agree it's not a business model per se.

186 points by JNRowe 6y ago

Open source sits alongside Free Software. Free Software as defined by the FSF is software that respects the users freedom. Freedom to use, copy, modify... They do say you can charge for it, but never claim it's a good business strategy. Consulting. Services. Education. Those seem like words that might let you make money. You can attach "open source" to those words but it obviously doesnt stand on it's own as a business model.

varispeed 6y ago
The big problem is that there is no distinction between an individual user, SME or a big corporation. The create grounds for exploitation of software developers, social divide and other unintended consequences. The promotion of open source by big corporations is cheaper in the long run that spending money on R&D, salaries, taxes as there is always going to be a good enough project for such corporation to appropriate and make money off of, without having to pay anything to contributors.
bartread 6y ago
> Consulting. Services. Education. Those seem like words that might let you make money. And that's cool but to a very great degree these often boil down to an exchange of time for money (unless by services you mean SaaS which is really just a product business with a different revenue model). You can make a living but you're on a treadmill that you can't ever really afford to get off of, and it doesn't really scale other than by adding more people. I mean it's OK, don't get me wrong - it's certainly better than a kick in the balls - and you can make a decent living from it. But I don't find it particularly appealing: I'd much rather be involved in creating products that you can sell over and over again. And, if what you've created is of value to others, why shouldn't you charge them a fee to use it? (Btw, I'd also add paid support to your list but, again, I wouldn't want to build a business heavily based around providing support because support can really wear you down - or at least it can really wear me down. It's absolutely necessary, but not something I find at all enjoyable.)
- jstanley 6y ago
  > And, if what you've created is of value to others, why shouldn't you charge them a fee to use it? You can, but you probably won't succeed if it's open source, because people can share it around freely without your consent.
  - amelius 6y ago
    There is a middle way: license your software so that big players with more than (say) $1M revenue will have to pay for the development of the software, while the small guy can use the free version. > because people can share it around freely without your consent. The nice thing about this approach is that big players like FAANG can't really get around it. But it doesn't matter since your software is probably already a bargain for them (all these big companies are essentially built on open source).
  - mids_hn 6y ago
    Another approach is a source-available license. The one I'm interested in would be one, where viewing, modifying, recompiling the source is allowed, but redistribution is allowed only to those who had bought the license from all owners of the source and it's modifications. It would produce a nice "waterfall" effect. It wouldn't be open-source nor free software, but most people don't really need limitless redistribution, and the source would be proof that said software isn't malicious.
- jiofih 6y ago
  Aka commercial software. Nothing wrong with it indeed! Just don’t package it with a weird “open” license and pretend it’s OSS. You can dual license if needed and deal with the consequences.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  The real treadmill is the current monetary system. Even if you make a product, but revenue doesn't grow at least 15-20% YoY (the rate of money printing last year), its value is shrinking over time.
  - 6y ago

hdkekbro 6y ago

Who are these imaginary foes who are presenting their business model to investors with simply the words “Open Source” on a single slide?

taylorwc 6y ago
Early stage investor here. You’d be shocked. It’s extremely en vogue to start a company and have your value prop be “open source alternative to X,” without any regard for whether there is actually any logic to something being open source.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Most absurd open source alternative you have been pitched?
  - taylorwc 6y ago
    I’d feel a little bad calling any out bc it’s usually not too hard to figure it out if I gave that info even without a name :)
    - bdcravens 6y ago
      I'll read between the lines and assume that means you've heard some pretty absurd ones.
      - taylorwc 6y ago
        Haha I mean nothing that was obviously ridiculous, like “Applebee’s, but open source” or something. It was more just really hand-wavy logic around why their product needed something open source, with no really compelling answer.
        mcbits 6y ago
        I think "because everything should be open source" is a fine answer to why something should be open source, even if it doesn't answer the different and more important question about how the company will make money.

walrus01 6y ago

I pretty much stopped taking this seriously after they compared restaurants to software development. Restaurants have very different operating cost structures.

II2II 6y ago
The article's point is the product is not the business model, and the author did not try to stretch the point by comparing open source software business models to culinary business models. I suspect the example was selected since many people aspire to open their own restaurant even though they know (or ought to know) the failure rate is atrociously high.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  COVID-19 enters the chat.

rapnie 6y ago

The mentioned Redhat article Part 2 is a 404. Here's the archived version: "How to Make Money from Open Source Platforms, Part 2: Open Core vs. Hybrid Business Models" https://archive.is/Yhr8l https://archive.is/Yhr8l

SteveNuts 6y ago

24 hour/365 production support is a requirement for large companies, sell that. Putting features behind a paywall doesn't work when the entire business can be forked and those features implemented for free. See AWS with Elasticsearch. There's a reason enterprises use MSSQL, Oracle, etc.

FearlessNebula 6y ago
If I understand this correctly, you're saying companies choose to license paid databases like Microsoft SQL or Oracle over open source SQL databases for support. What kind of support do companies need for a database? I can't figure out this error message my query generates or how can I update to the next version of your DB? Something along those lines?
- hvasilev 6y ago
  if there is a sufficiently large issue with the product itself, the vendor is monetarily incentivised to fix it asap. I personally have no expectation of that for free / os software.
  - silvestrov 6y ago
    > sufficiently large issue My experience is that for 99% companies there is absolutely no way to be "sufficiently large" for Oracle to take notice of any bugs/problems with their SQL database. As you don't have the source, there is no way to get the problem fixed. With open source software you can go on the market and hire one of the developers or an independent contractor.
    - ab_testing 6y ago
      I think it depends on the type of Oracle product that you are implementing. Having implemented Oracle packaged products for a long time (ERP, OBIEE etc.), there are hundreds of known bugs in each of the modules. In fact, many times, new clients comb through the bug reports before implementing a new module to check if a listed feature has a bug.

bombcar 6y ago

Open Source isn’t a business model but it CAN be a support model - for the right market the number of companies who will be willing to fund features/fixes that the company can’t be bothered to get noticeable. It can also be shown as a “backup” - if we fail you have the source and can continue to maintain it.

kevincox 6y ago
"backup" is one of the main reasons I prefer open source. Even if it is funded by one company now (and I pay them) there is some sort of continuum plan if they go bust. I am not immediately screwed and I can consider options such as self-maintenance, forks or a migration. This also applies if they change the terms or price.
- bombcar 6y ago
  The amount of monkey-patching I've done to production systems where I don't even have the code (Java is great for this) is immense.
  - laurent92 6y ago
    I personally believe Java wouldn’t have been successful 5 years earlier, during the time when everyone was encrypting their code. It was an inacceptable trade-off before Internet. After internet, most software is partly online anyway.
- laurent92 6y ago
  Maintenance is a really good point, but we haven’t found a way to monetize it. If I gave my software as OSS to paid customers, I’d immediately lose most of my other sales and give my little implementation secrets to my competitors. I’d like to be able to say “And for +15%, get the source and ability to compile and fix forever”. And not lose my business in the process.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    You don’t have to use a true open source license- simply a “shared source” or something with a clause making it BSD when the business ceases operations or similar.

matsemann 6y ago

It's really common for Launc HNs, though. This search shows many just the last two months: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22launch%20HN%22%20open%20source&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (with some false positives) Amusingly, two variants of "open source Datadog" the same week. Are these kind of OS copies successful in YC context? They are apparently getting accepted.

f430 6y ago

Open source is as sustainable as a closed business model in some sectors as long as you are willing to be creative. I've invested/funded/donated to several OS projects. I don't really expect to make money in most. I do it for the same reason I give large tips time to time. Somebody has to do it because the value they are providing is IMMENSE. I ask nothing in return. I give without really thinking about maximizing profit. The way I see it is that when you give to good cause the universe will reward you in ways you don't expect. I encourage others who are successful to give to OS projects especially folks who work on projects full time with little to no way of supporting themselves because they can't memorize graph algorithms or do whiteboard interviews or neurally diverse. As much as I have gripes with Github as a corporate entity, it's platform does serve a useful purpose in that it facilitates the movement of capital to OS projects.

ivanche 6y ago
I applaud you sir! I started doing something similar one year ago - at the beginning of each month I donate a few $ to one of free/open source projects I use (and every month it's another project that receives donation). I know that one donation won't change author's life, but if enough people do it regularly...

Railsify 6y ago

It's often used as a marketing model.

throwawaymanbot 6y ago

Always with the Open-source is not a business model garbage. Its time to realize that the English Language is not a business model either. But from it a lot of economic activity is spawned by it, and created through it. The same with open-source.

cblconfederate 6y ago

Unfortunately it is a marketing term now, or new age jargon crap like "dont be evil"

dalbasal 6y ago

Kind of Meta: The meaning of "business model," in a software/startup context is somewhat quaint: “All it really meant was how you planned to make money.” "Model" seems grandiose for a word that could be simplified to "income source." Comparisons to restaurants tend to be strained. Restaurant "business models" are not generally that complicated: People pay restaurants for food. Some deliver. The reason software people contemplate business models and restaurateurs don't is that "software," regardless of licensing, doesn't come with a standard business model. Every one is a snowflake. In software, "business model" is a wide range of possibilities. Most of them failing. Many quitely succeeding. A few explosively winning. Is AirBnB a software business model? Is Adwords? Even MSFT, which does literally exchange software for money... MSFT's "business model" is a complicated, impossible to replicate thing. The majority of software that's literally exchanged for money is done with some sort of services/support bundled in... and the customer is a business. If I give it away then why do people buy it?" is not even a sensible question. What does that question mean for Google, Apple or Amazon? There are plenty of exceptions: Photoshop, MS office... but even these are becoming online services and the "business model" is less directly "software for cash." TLDR, software doesn't have a standard business model regardless. Weighted by revenue share, the vast majority of software revenue comes from advertising, luxury electronics, web services or some other "business model" that isn't contradicted by OS in any way. "Selling software" in a sandwich-4-cash comparable way is surprisingly rare, regardless of license.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Judgmentality 6y ago
> Every [software business] is a snowflake. As much as I appreciate this comment, it's less limited to software than you paint it to be. When you start digging into how businesses actually make money, you quickly realize it's rarely what it seems. Many gas stations that are wildly successful, such as Sheetz and Wawa, don't make their money selling gas, they make it selling food using gas as a commodity to get the customer in the door. Likewise, McDonald's doesn't really make its money selling food either, although this is a lot more complicated and heavily involves real estate and franchising. In other words, nothing is really as it seems when you peel back the veneer. Software just happens to be relatively new and is poorly understood by most people.

hvasilev 6y ago

There are a million ways in which your business can go belly up, there is so much that can go wrong at any point. I see these open source startups and I just cannot fathom how clueless MOST of these people need to be to build their businesses around an ideology. I guess if you start from a very specific strategy and you make sure that the FREE/OSS route is the optimal for the sake of your business, it can make sense. Honestly if this happens to me, I would probably get discouraged by the track record of such companies, and just backtrack into a model with a better one, in order to give my business the best possible chance.

sunstone 6y ago

Oh yes it is. But like most products it has its market segment. And that segment is a group that requires a certain function that is not a competitive advantage for any in the group and wants to get that function for the lowest possible cost. Ok, so much for abstractions. A stark example is that on Microsoft's Azure the majority of VM's are running Linux. A lot of companies want cloud based VM's and they don't want to pay for Microsoft's OS to run them when they can use Linux for free, so they don't. Another example is OpenStreetMap. Many companies (including Apple) spend millions a year upgrading openstreetmaps. A lot of companies need a mapping function but it's silly for each one to carry the burden of creating their own map when they can all pitch in and use the final result. This is the market segment where Open Source makes sense.

rrdharan 6y ago
These are use cases and examples where open source makes sense, not a business (i.e. sustainable profit) model.

abetusk 6y ago

I would encourage people to read the article. VM Brasseur has a click-baity title, which is fine, but the point they are making is actually a bit more subtle. I'll quote from the article: > There is a great number of potential business models, but “open source” is not one of them. It is, instead, one of the many tools that can be employed in order to make a selected business model work as expected. > Therefore open source ... does not ... concern itself with business any more than food concerns itself with business. If there is a business that has a business model that is not living up to expectations, and if that business model uses open source as one if its tools, it’s illogical to blame open source for the failure. The gist of the article isn't "open source and business are incompatible", rather, it's saying "don't blame open source for a failure of your business". VM Brasseur focuses on open core specifically, a subset of an "open source business strategy", talking about what kind of expectations one should have engaging in that strategy, pointing to John Mark Walker's post on "How to Make Money from Open Source Platforms" [0]. As an aside, I would like to point out that there are successes in some businesses pursuing an "open source" strategy, for a broader form of open source, either using open source as a key feature or because the technology was open sourced, abandoned and picked up by someone else. Arduino [1] comes to mind, where they used the open sourced Arduino platform, the IDE, the libraries and the open source hardware schematic and boards, that was essentially abandoned by the original creators and picked up by Massimo Banzi and David Mellis. There were other factors to Arduino's success, such as focusing on artists and educators, there being a need for a cheap, accessible electronics/microcontroller platform, selling physical devices and various other economic factors that went into making the business viable, etc., so maybe I'm being overly pedantic and not really contradicting VM Brasseur's claim. In case people don't know, VM Brasseur is a big proponent of open source and has written a book called "Forge Your Future With Open Source" [2] and is in the process of writing a new book about "FOSS strategy in business" [3]. [0] https://www.linux.com/news/how-make-money-open-source-platforms/ https://www.linux.com/news/how-make-money-open-source-platfo... [1] https://arduinohistory.github.io/ https://arduinohistory.github.io/ [2] https://pragprog.com/titles/vbopens/forge-your-future-with-open-source/ https://pragprog.com/titles/vbopens/forge-your-future-with-o... [3] https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2021/03/19/coming-soon-a-new-book-about-foss-strategy-in-business https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2021/03/19/coming-soon-...

6y ago

eye8one2 6y ago

Whats up with all the opensource hate on here lately? Has Bill Gates secretly bought this site or something? (User was shadow banned for this post)

detaro 6y ago
in what way is this "opensource hate"?
- bdcravens 6y ago
  It's not. It's a useful discussion about the pragmatic limitation of open source.
nadspoly 6y ago
Maybe the pandemic made people realise affording food and stuff for your work is nice but open source doesn't come near that except a lucky few.
- detaro 6y ago
  Same question to you: how is this "opensource hate"?

ce385 6y ago

A 100%. We try to make as much as possible of our online video editor (www.typestudio.co) free of charge and try to be as transparent as possible in our communication. But with open source we could never raise a seed round.

bdcravens 6y ago

Baseball is not a business model either.

zouhair 6y ago

Baking bread is not a business model, a bakery on the other hand.

pvorb 6y ago
A bakery is a business. Selling the bread to consumers in a shop is the business model.
timwaagh 6y ago
What about Inspiring Young Aspiring Bakers to bake bread for free so we can all have free bread? Is that a business model?

JoelJacobson 6y ago

Open Source = the “Atoms” in Our “Digital Periodic Table” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26604020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26604020

kemitchell 6y ago

Straw Man I've seen "not a business model" quipped a hundred times, as if that ends whatever debate is going on. I've yet to see anyone actually argue that open source actually is a business model, as opposed to having their argument bent that way. The author doesn't link to any examples. Who are they browbeating? I don't see MongoDB arguing that the meaning of open source should address financial incentives for developers, either. I see them arguing that open source copyleft can be strong enough to demand openness from their competitors, as GPL would have in the packaged-software era. Mongo have a financial concern, but exactly to the author's point about means versus ends, they're not trying to write their business into any definition. They're reading the definition to cover a license that works for their business. If open source didn't concern itself with business, it wouldn't exist. The whole pitch was to business. Cathedral and the Bazaar was a marketing manual for selling manager-types. O'Reilly bankrolled events and meetings. Early on in OSI history, they readily approved several stronger copyleft licenses for specific businesses. MPL. Sleepycat. QPL. IPL. RPL. Arguably AGPL. That's the history. JMW does say there hasn't been a successful open core product, but he defines success as "ubiquity in the modern data center". In business, there's plenty of success between irrelevance and market domination. Ferraris and fast chargers aren't ubiquitous in modern garages. What I see here is that open source is a business model to some interested parties. That model is add-on services---integration, customization, support, hosting---and no other. Never mind that dual licensing, open core, delayed release, and others existed well before RedHat and WordPress and IBM successes made headlines. Never mind that these models had their business standard bearers, too. Never mind that they sometimes offered support documentation or configurations for hosting that add-on service companies didn't. The difference now is that the anti-commercial, permissive-focused, "open source means I never hear 'no'" faction view happens to correspond to the interests of the titans of industry, who are all cloud services companies. These companies want to commoditize their complements---"open source" means we can reap what you sow and sell it to our customers---but not the proprietary code they use to differentiate their clouds. They patronize the big open source foundations. We shouldn't be asking what open source is or means, as if it's an end in itself. We should be asking what it's for. And accepting there was never any conflict-free consensus there. We brushed all that under a rug in the late 1990s and early 2000s, because there was fame and money and a sense of purpose to be had selling "open source" as a brand and a "revolution". Now that work is done, the victorious allies are squabbling again. So it goes.

jarrell_mark 6y ago

Open source tends to be used as a user acquisition strategy for companies in the growth stage not worrying about monetization. Once they get to the stage of trying to monetize their newfound userbase, they rethink the value of releasing their product as open source.

slap_shot 6y ago

SaaS is out sourced IT. Plenty of SaaS could open source their entire code base and it would have little effect on sales; people would gladly still pay for it to be hosted. In some categories, having the code open source helps gain adoption early in the process. So yes, open source is not a business model, but plenty of open source software is monetized these days.

xupybd 6y ago
Very true, also it's a way of sucking people in. I run a few servers at work, hosting non critical services, such as password management, wiki and other things that aren't used by many in the org. The day those get used by more than a few people we will go paid SAAS as I don't have the time or mandate to provide 24/7 support.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> SaaS is out sourced IT. Plenty of SaaS could open source their entire code base and it would have little effect on sales; people would gladly still pay for it to be hosted. The problem is that with open source, anybody can be the SaaS provider and make the money from the open source software. In fact, companies will be more willing to go with either the bigger names or providers they have existing contracts with, than a small open source company. SaaS inherently favors the larger corporations.
musicale 6y ago
> SaaS > plenty of open source software is monetized these days One of the most successful models has been to take open source software that someone else wrote, add your own proprietary extensions and enhancements, and sell it as a service. Some of the most appealing aspects of open source for businesses are potentially reduced labor costs (because much of the software development work will be either done for free or paid for by others) and faster time to market (because much or most of the engineering work has already been done.)

adamlangsner 6y ago

It is not a business model. But it is a good communication and branding strategy

blueyes 6y ago

Open source is to software makers what Groupon is to restaurants: a way to get people in the door, but many of those people are not, and will never become, the customers you seek. Every open source business sells something else, often a solution to its own complexity, such as managed instances.

offtop5 6y ago
You hit the nail on the head, I think ghost blog is relatively easy to set up, but for $9 a month and you'll handle my hosting and my ssl certs, and most people with a bit of disposable income are fine with paying that. I just spent $80 on a nice meal and a couple of drinks, if my blog is anything like an income source I'll have no problem with spending $100 a month for someone to manage it for me. I would still advise students, and other new developers to go through the motions of hosting things themselves via AWS or whatever. If you can get a Ubuntu instance on ec2 to run a public facing website you probably can walk into a tech company and get an entry level job. It's not necessarily hard to learn how to do these things, it's just tedious. Avoiding the tedious drama is how open source companies make money
- mraza007 6y ago
  I totally agree with your comment and you gave a great analogy

seoaeu 6y ago

What this article misses is the presence of bad faith actors who make billions from open source but studiously work to prevent even a small amount of that flowing back to the companies that wrote the software. Kind of like the difference between a restaurant failing because they can't get enough customers vs. failing because people keep robbing them.

tybit 6y ago
This is a bad faith analogy, others profiting from OSS they didn’t write themselves is a feature not a bug. Stealing from a restaurant is not.
- seoaeu 6y ago
  Others profiting at the expense of the authors is not a desired feature. A necessary consequence of the current OSS regime perhaps, but not desired. The definitions written down decades ago don't have to be the final say. I chose the example of stealing from a restaurant precisely because if that were happening, people would call for legal changes to prevent it. Which proves it is sometimes worthwhile to make legal changes to protect value creating enterprises. The only question is whether or how the same should be done for OSS.

mch82 6y ago

Open source is an implementation strategy for closing a business model. Strategic use of open source can move a business model from a money loser to a money maker. It can be extremely strategic to use source components in the supply chain of a software product. Using open source components allows the engineering team (if one is needed at all) to focus on the unique parts of the project. This can reduce development/maintenance costs and timelines. It can also make up for missing skills on a business team. Facebook did this with Open Compute Project. It can also be strategic to release parts of a product as open source. For example, releasing a database, OS, or framework as open source can establish an industry standard, improve brand awareness, quality, and make it easier to hire new talent. Basecamp did this with Rails. Google did this with Android. Open source can also commoditize a market segment to a point where large companies that might otherwise compete choose not to. WhatsApp did this with Erlang and their initial messaging stack. However, if you’re releasing 100% of your intellectual property & technology as open source then you might attract enough attention to get funding, but you probably don’t have a business model.

hda111 6y ago
I don’t agree with reduced maintenance cost because all internal patches must be ported to newer versions of the component all the time.
- hansvm 6y ago
  It's quite possible for that workload to still be cheap relative to writing it yourself from scratch (e.g., I wouldn't think twice about vendoring git-subrepo). That said, if incorporating upstream changes is more expensive than writing it yourself then...just fork the project and write new changes yourself. It's definitely possible that the project isn't a good fit and that you'd be better off starting from scratch than starting from an open-source base, but that dimension is orthogonal to the question of ongoing maintenance cost.
- mch82 6y ago
  The concern you raise is a valid & important to consider. I’ve seen situations where there’s a mismatch between the update schedule of a component and the update schedule of the larger project & it creates an issue.

Xisiqomelir 6y ago

Do we expect copyright licenses to be business models too? Does anyone?

crvdgc 6y ago

The author linked to a wikipedia page[0] for examples of viable business models, and it interestingly includes "Professional Open-source Model" without explanation. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_model#Examples https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_model#Examples

cryptonector 6y ago

I've been saying this forever. Open source is just a tool. It's a tool you use to attract customers who want it, or employees who want it, or whatever. It's not a product though, and it's not a sustainable business model. The choice of license you use too is a business tool. Consortia are about the only successful open source business model. The most successful such consortium is the SQLite Consortium, which clearly makes D.R. Hipp and his team very happy. One key to SQLite's business success was keeping the best testsuite for it closed source, which makes it extremely difficult to fork the project, or even to contribute to it, which leaves the team as essential to those who depend on SQLite (which includes a lot of FAANG).

ozim 6y ago
No, open source is not a tool. Open source should be the default mode of operations. It is not some kind of "can opener" to get people who might be interested in your product. Most of the software does not use "magic algorithms" that no one else cannot think of. Power of people and companies should rise from trust and professional behavior. Well it might be that there really is some magic algorithm but if someone who I cannot trust is providing that algorithm I am probably better off not using it anyway. I am willing to pay to someone who I can trust that he will do proper work, he does not have to be a "mastermind". He does not have to have some magic tricks up in his sleeve. Remember that trust and professional behavior beat any "magic algorithm" in the long run anyway. By having open source company/person is signaling that they also rely on trust, but don't use is cynically, please.

nanoscopic 6y ago

The ultimate dream of open source is for all software to become open source. Open source need not mean that the development of the software in question wasn't paid for. The ideal is one of concrete socialism. To share the results of the labor and to continually improve rather than everyone constantly redoing the same work. Open source may not be a business model but it can certainly be viewed as an idealistic vision for software development as a whole. I am wary of anything that makes absolute statements such as the one in this article: "no successful product has come from an open core company" The article quotes it and seems to agree with it. It is absolute rubbish. There are a good number of successful open core products.

w3news 6y ago

It's just where you build software for. Of software isn't your main product, just needed so you can better make your main product, than open source software can be very helpful for you. It's a nice way to help each other, and it doesn't change your profit. But if software is your main product, than is open source very hard to pay your bills. Also if you build software for a company, very few will pay for something that will be shared to everybody. But I know a hospital that pay to write software for some hardware on Linux, and share it as open source so all hospitals that use that hardware with Linux can use it. That is helping other people if you have solve a problem. Buy indeed, open source isn't a business model, but a way of life.

pritambarhate 6y ago

yes, open source is not a business model, it's a marketing model. All these startups (MongoDB, Elastic, etc.) they used open source like that only. A very good marketing model. These change of terms is also a marketing model. Now the slogan is: It's still open source for everyone, except for AWS!

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

Open source is certainly one way to do marketing, particularly developer marketing. I agree it's not a business model per se.