11 ms·

Why Kreya isn't open source

91 points by CommonGuy 5y ago

user_7832 5y ago
I wonder - would it be a good idea to release the source code a few versions old? Competitors likely already have implemented similar things so no major corporate issues. Not open source, just source-available, so no issue with Amazon running off with the code. And power users/fans can add their own additional software which likely will still work with newer versions. Of course, I'm likely missing several things - I'd be grateful if someone could point these out. (I've been thinking of this strategy not just in this specific case but in general.)
- soapdog 5y ago
  Well, for one thing you might be missing is that software doesn't change drastically between versions these days. Specially if you factor rapid release cycles in. So whatever is present in your new version is just a small set of features compared to all that is available on your older versions. People might simply be tempted by the FOSS version, not because it is FOSS but because it is free. A ton of people use FOSS software not because of all the ethos of free software but because it is gratis. If an old version is already useful enough and available as a fork, it will be hard to tempt some one to pay for your full version.
  - user_7832 5y ago
    Yeah I get your point. I was not referring to one numerical version behind but rather one "version with significant features" behind, sorry should have been more clear. The cost point is very valid. Of course if I were to put out any code (I'm not a full-time developer) it would be as a hobby so monetization would be a bonus. I wonder if Kreya/others etc could offer some customer service that's so much of a benefit that corps want it (maybe like what Red Hat does). Though that'll also add complexity... a chicken and egg problem I suppose.
svnpenn 5y ago
> First off, we are huge fans of open source projects. For example, Kreya uses the open source scripting language Scriban. I really don't know how you overcome to cognitive dissonance to continue after this. Call me naive, but it's pretty scummy to take someone else's open source work, add some extra code, and slap a pricetag on it. Also doing that violates most copyleft licences.
- cpach 5y ago
  “Also doing that violates most copyleft licences.” Scriban isn’t copyleft though. https://github.com/scriban/scriban/blob/master/license.txt https://github.com/scriban/scriban/blob/master/license.txt
- Pet_Ant 5y ago
  Scriban is BSD so they knew what they were doing. It was always a possibilty, they made a choice. https://github.com/scriban/scriban/blob/master/license.txt https://github.com/scriban/scriban/blob/master/license.txt
  - DocTomoe 5y ago
    - Turing_Machine 5y ago
      If the scriban people didn't want that to happen, they could have used a license (e.g., GPL) that prohibits it. Some of us use BSD or MIT licenses precisely for that reason. I'm happy if someone uses my MIT-licensed code in a commercial product. That's why I chose that license. It's not "morally reprehensible" in any way.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      It's not "technically" legal, it's fully legal in every sense. And using someone's code for a purpose they explicitly allowed is about as far from morally reprehensible as it gets.
    - 5y ago
marcodiego 5y ago
Most relevant part: "With the upcoming 1.8 release of Kreya, we plan to include a paid version".
- vbcr 5y ago
  Couldn't they have gone Intellij Idea route. Their community (free) version is Apache License 2.0, Ultimate (paid) version is closed source.
Pet_Ant 5y ago
I'd like to see source trusts like the code is given to an authority that will make it Apache/MIT/BSD if conditions are met. Let the creators draw the line in the sand. Company goes bankrupt. No new release for 3 years. Or maybe always release the code from 5 years commit by commit. Just to prevent abandonware and lost sources. Should be sufficient to preserve commercial viability.
- hedora 5y ago
  The Business Source License more or less achieves this.
  - q-big 5y ago
    > The Business Source License more or less achieves this. The Business Source License is not an open source license. Sources: > https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ > https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html "The Business Source License (this document, or the “License”) is not an Open Source license. However, the Licensed Work will eventually be made available under an Open Source License, as stated in this License."
    - coder543 5y ago
      You seem to be missing the whole point of this thread. They wanted something like a "source trust". The BSL provides something like that, as long as you aren't worried about people breaking the license without concern for legal consequence. The code eventually becomes open source after certain criteria are met. No one in this thread claimed that BSL-licensed code is immediately open source.
- pid-1 5y ago
  GitLab does something like that if I'm not mistaken. Features start in the most expensive tier, then tricke down and end up in OSS.
  - notyourday 5y ago
Sytten 5y ago
We are having a similar discussion for the startup I am working on (Caido.io). We are bootstrap and would like to make a living out of our work. We just don't have the luxury of VC money where we can open source and worry about making money later. Our compromise is that we are open sourcing anything that is not the core of the application for now. If we have enterprise / cloud features down the line, we will open source the core. I would really like to live in a world when open source doesn't necessarily mean gratis or direct copy by a competitor, but I have yet to see that work for desktop applications.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  I love open source, but commercial software is completely fine in my opinion. I think the idea that there needs to be a way how open source can be monetized is very damaging to the idea itself. You can do that through support and expertise of course, but can also sell the software itself. You can also open source it later if you are established but you can also choose not to. The advantage of open source is that you may be able to leverage the ingenuity of people outside your company, get them invested in your software. I believe most are in open source to share code with each other, not necessarily to build a business. Most people that make money with open source don't really offer the software, they offer the whole package of a solution that can solve a problem for business customers. But not every form of software can fit into such a scenario.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  Being able to make a living is more important than open sourcing. Keep in mind that these other open source companies likely took that decision because they thought they would earn more money than keeping it closed source. It's a user funnel.
- q-big 5y ago
  > I would really like to live in a world when open source doesn't necessarily mean gratis or direct copy by a competitor Open source does not mean "gratis". See for example this historic order form of software offered by the Free Software Foundation: > https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/17/gnu_bulletin_9401_30.html https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/17/gnu_bulletin_940... Open source just implies that by economic principles, the market price for the respective software will soon converge to the marginal cost. Just to give another example how open source software might have a price: start a Kickstarter campaign which will release a software product as open source as soon as, say, 100,000 USD or EUR is reached.
q-big 5y ago
I respect that they have reasons not to release Kreya as open source. Fine. But claiming "We love open source" is a blatant lie: the article makes it really clear that they only love the aspects of open source that are to their advantage. They should better honestly write this.
- aluminussoma 5y ago
  Come on, that is being being pedantic about semantics. They do not need to be all-in with open source to like it/love it/appreciate it.
  - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
    No, it's not: the point is that they're basically saying "we love it as long as it's someone else who loses potential profits, not us". This is kind of a significant, and not a semantic minor detail. If one believes that open source something can lead to a loss of profits, then one must believe also that the open source software they have likely used has already made that sacrifice. It's easy to appreciate the sacrifice of others but then fail to make it oneself.
    - sinuhe69 5y ago
      Or the authors of the OS projects didn’t intend to earn money with it at all. Which can be perfectly the case!
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    "We love all-you-can-eat buffets, just not the part where you pay for it (so we climb through the window of our local Golden Corral to make our getaway)"
    - giraffe_lady 5y ago
      "I love all you can eat buffets but today I'm not really that hungry and it throws off the balance of cost to result so I think I'll just get a sandwich." This metaphor is alright for this actually.
jancsika 5y ago
> Once you open source a project, it is out in the open. Gitlab disproves this. E.g., they have no solution on the horizon for dealing with spam for their open source Gitlab Community Edition. That means that for common use cases like having an instance open to the public for participation in GSoC, a gitlab-ce instance will get eaten alive by indonesian casino spam (or whatever the current spam offerings happen to be). But they do have a solution for their proprietary Enterprise Edition which uses a proprietary blob. One of their employees suggested I just switch to that version because it's apparently available free of charge. The other possibility is to use whatever they run on their gitlab.com service. In that case it's not my instance so the license doesn't really matter as much. Nevertheless, I'm almost certain they are running their proprietary spam filter there so it's not open source either. In conclusion, this is a perfect refutation of the author's point. Start open, run a service that's free of charge, and slowly cut off the flow of key features to the open source version (or simply do not care about that flow). Edit: clarifications
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Gitlab are under no obligation to open-source specific features - rather, if the software is licensed under an OSD-compliant license, anyone has the right to fork it and add their own spam filtering. That's what openness is all about.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jancsika 5y ago
    I'm telling the author that there's virtually no threat of anyone forking gitlab-ce, for any reason whatsoever. Even though "anyone has the right," as you say, and even though the lack of spam filtering there makes gitlab-ce essentially useless as a public-facing repo service. Author claimed that open sourcing would equal less money for author. My argument is that is not a given nor even likely-- it depends on specifics wrt complexity of the software, difficulty of maintaining it, relationship of dev to users, etc.
andrewclunn 5y ago
I like the idea of a promise that all code will be open sourced at a 2 to 3 year delay. I have seen this model in use, and it disincentivizes competitor forks (especially if that open source is GPL) while still allowing paid versions.
traverseda 5y ago
Personally I'm a fan of MariaDB's "Business Source License". Enough of the benefits of open source that I can trust your product, but enough of the benefits of closed source that you can use whatever monetization strategy you want. It seems like a pretty good compromise to me.
- didip 5y ago
  Can you explain to me briefly what does business source license mean?
  - traverseda 5y ago
    Shared source that becomes truly open source after 5 years. This means that if the company managing the source code does really poorly someone else can fork it commercially, but only the version from 5 years ago. This protects users in the cases the managing company goes out of business, or goes evil, but still lets them put in arbitrary commercial restrictions.
eternityforest 5y ago
It seems like more and more companies are doing this. Kind of concerning. Is true FOSS going to fade away one day? Chromium no longer has sync, so we currently have no usable browsers that support Google's stuff. The last 15 years of open source progress seems to have been driven by big companies rather than the community. Community driven FOSS doesn't even seem like a reasonable idea at all given how much work it is, and how completely thankless it is, so most of what we get there is just "scratch your own itch" type stuff, often fairly useless outside a really specific use case, rather than the real pro-grade packages. Arch seems to be eating some of Debian's dev base, and Arch is built from the ground up for highly customized "just enough" setups. It seems like the community mostly just cares about privacy and tinkering these days. What's going to happen to the "Windows-like" side of FOSS?
- ahelwer 5y ago
  I don't know, there are a few companies I've seen around lately that have an open source "core" with proprietary business add-ons. Teleport and Tailscale for example. The Tailscale CEO wrote a post about it recently that got traction on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29736369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29736369
- ertian 5y ago
  I think it's a bit of a pendulum. The enthusiasm and excitement for open source was largely driven by the locked-down environment of the time. Access to source and high-quality free software with source was an exhilarating novelty. But now we're kind of saturated, and used to it. Practically everything is free, it's not exciting anymore. New open source projects feel like just a drop in the bucket. Creators don't get the same sense of accomplishment from releasing new code. It may be necessary for a whole new generation to experience how shitty it is to be stuck with for-pay locked-down software that gradually rots beneath you, juggling library licences, phoning IT help lines for trivial problems, and having to ship every few years to some new (expensive) hotness.
- johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago
  > Chromium no longer has sync, so we currently have no usable browsers that support Google's stuff. Yes, Google has been not only anti-competitive, also very anti-FOSS. Google has been slowly making Chromium project more closed source. The original article of this thread is an evidence of Google's harmful effects on FOSS eco-system. Now other companies are also retreating on their open source effort because of Google.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
CyberRabbi 5y ago
> First off, we are huge fans of open source projects. This one sentence makes the whole post come off as disingenuous to me. Who isn’t a fan of free work?
- remram 5y ago
  The rest of the article explains why they won't release this product opensource even though they love it. It is not disingenuous. They released Mapperly under Apache-2.0, but I don't know if you read that far. If I tell you that "I love NodeJS but this specific project needs to run on embedded so I used C", it doesn't diminish my love of NodeJS or make it disingenuous. Love doesn't mean you'll always pick the thing no matter what, just a strong preference over the other possible options.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    > The rest of the article explains why they won't release opensource even though they love it. It is not disingenuous. No it doesn't. This is like someone saying, I love poor people and helping them but I love capitalism more because then I can charge those poor people in order for them to get help. Might as well just say what they really love which is money.
    - remram 5y ago
      Who is poor? How does needing money make you love capitalism? How do you personally pay rent if you feel that not giving every single thing for free is wrong?
    - CyberRabbi 5y ago
      > Might as well just say what they really love which is money. Thanks for understanding my point. They are just saying they “love open source” to ingratiate themselves to the reader but it’s a meaningless statement because who wouldn’t love free work? The entire article that follows comes off like a long-winded rationalization. They would be better off saying “we don’t open source our product because we don’t want to” I would respect that more and it would save me time.
otikik 5y ago
For an app like this, open sourcing non-business-critical parts of the app a perfectly valid way to go about it, like they are doing with the templating library. You still get visibility, testing and the occasional bugfix from the community. Another possible way to go about it is open-core: Open source version, with more advanced features on a closed-source solution. Contributors to the open source version have to waive off some of their rights in order for this to work, though. There are tools that automate most of that these days.
paxys 5y ago
> And even if we created or found an applicable license, who would enforce it? We are a small team of four software engineers from Switzerland and we have neither the knowledge nor the means to report license violators. Everyone who goes "just release it under XYZ license" misses this one key part. There are next to zero examples of small companies successfully enforcing their software copyright. It is expensive and takes a team of lawyers to do so.
- abeyer 5y ago
  Is this less true for commercial licenses, though? If someone's going to violate your licensing terms, they don't really care which license they violate, and it's not like it's hard to find pirated software.
  - squeaky-clean 5y ago
    It's very hard to find pirated source code though.
    - abeyer 5y ago
      True in many cases, but I suspect the ones violating the license are more interested in getting free benefit of the software than they are in the philosophy of making source available.
    - yellowapple 5y ago
      It's almost trivial to create it yourself for anything written in C# or another .NET language. ILSpy and similar tools have existed for quite some time.
  - lolinder 5y ago
    If a company has to go onto a pirate website to get a copy, that's going to throw up red flags in all but truly corrupt organizations. If, on the other hand, a piece of software can be downloaded directly off the company's website, it's pretty easy to gloss over the fine print that says "if you comply with terms X, Y, and Z".
quadrifoliate 5y ago
Here's a possibly novel take – the modern interview process for software developers is causing more and more projects to move to these non-FOSS licensing terms. "Wait, what? What could convoluted interview processes possibly have to do with licensing?" Well, developers need to make money somehow. In the past, releasing your software as FOSS allowed you to display your skills for software development and feature planning out in the open. Often, you'd be hired on the basis of those demonstrable skills at a paying job even if you didn't make money on the product itself. Multiple engineers I know went through very abbreviated hiring processes, being pretty quickly waved through if they had worked on FOSS in any significant capacity. Today, that's not the case at all, and any interview process for a high-paying job seems to have 5-6 rounds of arduous interviews, no exceptions. I have conducted around fifty or so interview processes for dev positions at a non-FAANG company, and "look at the candidate's FOSS experience" isn't on a single one of them. I don't think I could get any major FOSS contributor exempted from a single interview process at my company on the basis of their experience. The case of the Homebrew creator and Google is reasonably well-known [1]. Well, the natural response is going to be for them to work on their own product, and not open up the source code unless they get paid for it. Which is what software devs are doing these days, in increasing numbers. ---------------------------------------- [1] https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768
- abeyer 5y ago
  Sounds plausible, but I dunno how prevalent that really is, though. Do that many people write OSS code just to get hired? I've never once made a contribution or started a project primarily because I thought it would get me a job or other professional recognition. I contribute to projects I think are worthwhile, to those that I benefit from and want to give back to, and to things that "scratch an itch" either personally or professionally.
  - quadrifoliate 5y ago
    > Do that many people write OSS code just to get hired? No, I meant that in the past, it was a significant incentive to release code that you were already working on for a company or product as FOSS, i.e. "Even if this company or job doesn't work out, the open-sourced code is a good way to demonstrate my technical capability". I am talking real, commercially capable tools. I would say that not too many people wrote OSS code to get hired, but a high number of people might have open-sourced existing code on the basis that it might help them get hired some day. If you haven't tried to build a company or product based on your code, then this wouldn't apply to you (unlike the Kreya devs).
Mikeb85 5y ago
I don't see why there's a need for this explanation. If your end goal is to sell the software you make you shouldn't open source it. The main use case for open source is software you USE, you release it into the wild so others also add to it and it becomes better for everyone to USE. See programming languages or frameworks. You're not selling the OSS, you're getting others to improve the OSS that you then use to create a closed source product. Open sourcing software you intend to sell means it's either a trojan horse or someone else just sells it (in one case dishonest, in another case you get exploited).
skadamat 5y ago
There's open source backend software and there's full-stack / GUI oriented software and in my limited experience, I don't think the latter always makes sense. Smarter people than me have articulated their points about that: - https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-dozen-reasons/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op... - https://macwright.com/2021/12/07/sharing-in-the-presence-of-computers-and-corporations.html https://macwright.com/2021/12/07/sharing-in-the-presence-of-... "Placemark, the application, won’t be open source. I didn’t even consider the possibility: open sourcing the application layer of a product just doesn’t work. You get all the downsides of community support, white-labeling, process friction, confusion around why people have to pay, confusion around whether to use the open source version or the paid version, and none of the benefits." I think the dream is to open source the standards, protocols, backend engines, etc. But man, whenever you have to think heavily about a user interface, things get really hard. How do you decentralize design of something?
encryptluks2 5y ago
This should be titled, why Kreya doesn't actually understand or believe in open source.
aidenn0 5y ago
> Desktop apps are a special case As someone who remembers when most apps were desktop apps this seems a strange point. I suppose it's a better look than what the actual header for this section should be which is "we want to sell this for money"
boarnoah 5y ago
I wonder if a nice source available license comes about, similar to how we have common ones for FOSS like MIT which are well understood and easy to apply. A source available license allowing for personal modifications, sharing with other licensees, contributing fixes that might not be a priority to the dev is present with projects like Unreal Engine and a few other examples I can think of. However they are all bespoke licensing.
yellowapple 5y ago
The "we want to make money" argument is pretty weak when desktop software like Ardour demonstrates that it's still possible and feasible. The "we don't want to be stuck with a too-permissive license" argument is also pretty weak when there are a lot of licenses besides MIT (and when they, being the copyright holders, can relicense at any time; sure, the cat's out of the bag for already-released code, but for future versions that ain't necessarily the case).
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  One counterexample doesn't make an argument "weak", if there are thousands of cases to the contrary. About what percentage of FOSS developers do you suppose make a living wage from their software? It's like pointing to a successful pop singer or pro athlete as an example of how it's possible to get rich doing those things. Possible? Certainly -- but only a minuscule percentage of the kids who start out in sports or music ever make it.
  - yellowapple 5y ago
    > One counterexample doesn't make an argument "weak", if there are thousands of cases to the contrary. Are there "thousands of cases to the contrary", though? About what percentage of FOSS developers do you suppose even try making payment a prerequisite for a ready-to-run official binary? Or for that matter, about what percentage even attempts to monetize at all? That's what makes the argument weak: it reeks strongly of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".
almet 5y ago
It really seems they're trying to get things right, but are afraid of the competition. In my opinion this is because the company and the product is new to the market. Once they know that their income isn't tied to them being closed-source, they might change their position on this, or they will keep their customer locked-up because they're afraid of them running away. This seems to be missing the point : Freedom for the users on one side, and sharing knowledge on the other side. Here you have neither of the two and the only reason is fear. If your startup isn't successful and you have open-sourced your code, it's probably not because of the competition using your code, but because you're not solving a problem that people need to be solved.
dafty4 5y ago
TLDR: Money

91 points by CommonGuy 5y ago

I wonder - would it be a good idea to release the source code a few versions old? Competitors likely already have implemented similar things so no major corporate issues. Not open source, just source-available, so no issue with Amazon running off with the code. And power users/fans can add their own additional software which likely will still work with newer versions. Of course, I'm likely missing several things - I'd be grateful if someone could point these out. (I've been thinking of this strategy not just in this specific case but in general.)

soapdog 5y ago
Well, for one thing you might be missing is that software doesn't change drastically between versions these days. Specially if you factor rapid release cycles in. So whatever is present in your new version is just a small set of features compared to all that is available on your older versions. People might simply be tempted by the FOSS version, not because it is FOSS but because it is free. A ton of people use FOSS software not because of all the ethos of free software but because it is gratis. If an old version is already useful enough and available as a fork, it will be hard to tempt some one to pay for your full version.
- user_7832 5y ago
  Yeah I get your point. I was not referring to one numerical version behind but rather one "version with significant features" behind, sorry should have been more clear. The cost point is very valid. Of course if I were to put out any code (I'm not a full-time developer) it would be as a hobby so monetization would be a bonus. I wonder if Kreya/others etc could offer some customer service that's so much of a benefit that corps want it (maybe like what Red Hat does). Though that'll also add complexity... a chicken and egg problem I suppose.

svnpenn 5y ago

> First off, we are huge fans of open source projects. For example, Kreya uses the open source scripting language Scriban. I really don't know how you overcome to cognitive dissonance to continue after this. Call me naive, but it's pretty scummy to take someone else's open source work, add some extra code, and slap a pricetag on it. Also doing that violates most copyleft licences.

cpach 5y ago
“Also doing that violates most copyleft licences.” Scriban isn’t copyleft though. https://github.com/scriban/scriban/blob/master/license.txt https://github.com/scriban/scriban/blob/master/license.txt
Pet_Ant 5y ago
Scriban is BSD so they knew what they were doing. It was always a possibilty, they made a choice. https://github.com/scriban/scriban/blob/master/license.txt https://github.com/scriban/scriban/blob/master/license.txt
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  - Turing_Machine 5y ago
    If the scriban people didn't want that to happen, they could have used a license (e.g., GPL) that prohibits it. Some of us use BSD or MIT licenses precisely for that reason. I'm happy if someone uses my MIT-licensed code in a commercial product. That's why I chose that license. It's not "morally reprehensible" in any way.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    It's not "technically" legal, it's fully legal in every sense. And using someone's code for a purpose they explicitly allowed is about as far from morally reprehensible as it gets.
  - 5y ago

marcodiego 5y ago

Most relevant part: "With the upcoming 1.8 release of Kreya, we plan to include a paid version".

vbcr 5y ago
Couldn't they have gone Intellij Idea route. Their community (free) version is Apache License 2.0, Ultimate (paid) version is closed source.

Pet_Ant 5y ago

I'd like to see source trusts like the code is given to an authority that will make it Apache/MIT/BSD if conditions are met. Let the creators draw the line in the sand. Company goes bankrupt. No new release for 3 years. Or maybe always release the code from 5 years commit by commit. Just to prevent abandonware and lost sources. Should be sufficient to preserve commercial viability.

hedora 5y ago
The Business Source License more or less achieves this.
- q-big 5y ago
  > The Business Source License more or less achieves this. The Business Source License is not an open source license. Sources: > https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ > https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html "The Business Source License (this document, or the “License”) is not an Open Source license. However, the Licensed Work will eventually be made available under an Open Source License, as stated in this License."
  - coder543 5y ago
    You seem to be missing the whole point of this thread. They wanted something like a "source trust". The BSL provides something like that, as long as you aren't worried about people breaking the license without concern for legal consequence. The code eventually becomes open source after certain criteria are met. No one in this thread claimed that BSL-licensed code is immediately open source.
pid-1 5y ago
GitLab does something like that if I'm not mistaken. Features start in the most expensive tier, then tricke down and end up in OSS.
- notyourday 5y ago

Sytten 5y ago

We are having a similar discussion for the startup I am working on (Caido.io). We are bootstrap and would like to make a living out of our work. We just don't have the luxury of VC money where we can open source and worry about making money later. Our compromise is that we are open sourcing anything that is not the core of the application for now. If we have enterprise / cloud features down the line, we will open source the core. I would really like to live in a world when open source doesn't necessarily mean gratis or direct copy by a competitor, but I have yet to see that work for desktop applications.

raxxorrax 5y ago
I love open source, but commercial software is completely fine in my opinion. I think the idea that there needs to be a way how open source can be monetized is very damaging to the idea itself. You can do that through support and expertise of course, but can also sell the software itself. You can also open source it later if you are established but you can also choose not to. The advantage of open source is that you may be able to leverage the ingenuity of people outside your company, get them invested in your software. I believe most are in open source to share code with each other, not necessarily to build a business. Most people that make money with open source don't really offer the software, they offer the whole package of a solution that can solve a problem for business customers. But not every form of software can fit into such a scenario.
cinntaile 5y ago
Being able to make a living is more important than open sourcing. Keep in mind that these other open source companies likely took that decision because they thought they would earn more money than keeping it closed source. It's a user funnel.
q-big 5y ago
> I would really like to live in a world when open source doesn't necessarily mean gratis or direct copy by a competitor Open source does not mean "gratis". See for example this historic order form of software offered by the Free Software Foundation: > https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/17/gnu_bulletin_9401_30.html https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/17/gnu_bulletin_940... Open source just implies that by economic principles, the market price for the respective software will soon converge to the marginal cost. Just to give another example how open source software might have a price: start a Kickstarter campaign which will release a software product as open source as soon as, say, 100,000 USD or EUR is reached.

q-big 5y ago

I respect that they have reasons not to release Kreya as open source. Fine. But claiming "We love open source" is a blatant lie: the article makes it really clear that they only love the aspects of open source that are to their advantage. They should better honestly write this.

aluminussoma 5y ago
Come on, that is being being pedantic about semantics. They do not need to be all-in with open source to like it/love it/appreciate it.
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  No, it's not: the point is that they're basically saying "we love it as long as it's someone else who loses potential profits, not us". This is kind of a significant, and not a semantic minor detail. If one believes that open source something can lead to a loss of profits, then one must believe also that the open source software they have likely used has already made that sacrifice. It's easy to appreciate the sacrifice of others but then fail to make it oneself.
  - sinuhe69 5y ago
    Or the authors of the OS projects didn’t intend to earn money with it at all. Which can be perfectly the case!
- smoldesu 5y ago
  "We love all-you-can-eat buffets, just not the part where you pay for it (so we climb through the window of our local Golden Corral to make our getaway)"
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    "I love all you can eat buffets but today I'm not really that hungry and it throws off the balance of cost to result so I think I'll just get a sandwich." This metaphor is alright for this actually.

jancsika 5y ago

> Once you open source a project, it is out in the open. Gitlab disproves this. E.g., they have no solution on the horizon for dealing with spam for their open source Gitlab Community Edition. That means that for common use cases like having an instance open to the public for participation in GSoC, a gitlab-ce instance will get eaten alive by indonesian casino spam (or whatever the current spam offerings happen to be). But they do have a solution for their proprietary Enterprise Edition which uses a proprietary blob. One of their employees suggested I just switch to that version because it's apparently available free of charge. The other possibility is to use whatever they run on their gitlab.com service. In that case it's not my instance so the license doesn't really matter as much. Nevertheless, I'm almost certain they are running their proprietary spam filter there so it's not open source either. In conclusion, this is a perfect refutation of the author's point. Start open, run a service that's free of charge, and slowly cut off the flow of key features to the open source version (or simply do not care about that flow). Edit: clarifications

zozbot234 5y ago
Gitlab are under no obligation to open-source specific features - rather, if the software is licensed under an OSD-compliant license, anyone has the right to fork it and add their own spam filtering. That's what openness is all about.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jancsika 5y ago
  I'm telling the author that there's virtually no threat of anyone forking gitlab-ce, for any reason whatsoever. Even though "anyone has the right," as you say, and even though the lack of spam filtering there makes gitlab-ce essentially useless as a public-facing repo service. Author claimed that open sourcing would equal less money for author. My argument is that is not a given nor even likely-- it depends on specifics wrt complexity of the software, difficulty of maintaining it, relationship of dev to users, etc.

andrewclunn 5y ago

I like the idea of a promise that all code will be open sourced at a 2 to 3 year delay. I have seen this model in use, and it disincentivizes competitor forks (especially if that open source is GPL) while still allowing paid versions.

traverseda 5y ago

Personally I'm a fan of MariaDB's "Business Source License". Enough of the benefits of open source that I can trust your product, but enough of the benefits of closed source that you can use whatever monetization strategy you want. It seems like a pretty good compromise to me.

didip 5y ago
Can you explain to me briefly what does business source license mean?
- traverseda 5y ago
  Shared source that becomes truly open source after 5 years. This means that if the company managing the source code does really poorly someone else can fork it commercially, but only the version from 5 years ago. This protects users in the cases the managing company goes out of business, or goes evil, but still lets them put in arbitrary commercial restrictions.

eternityforest 5y ago

It seems like more and more companies are doing this. Kind of concerning. Is true FOSS going to fade away one day? Chromium no longer has sync, so we currently have no usable browsers that support Google's stuff. The last 15 years of open source progress seems to have been driven by big companies rather than the community. Community driven FOSS doesn't even seem like a reasonable idea at all given how much work it is, and how completely thankless it is, so most of what we get there is just "scratch your own itch" type stuff, often fairly useless outside a really specific use case, rather than the real pro-grade packages. Arch seems to be eating some of Debian's dev base, and Arch is built from the ground up for highly customized "just enough" setups. It seems like the community mostly just cares about privacy and tinkering these days. What's going to happen to the "Windows-like" side of FOSS?

ahelwer 5y ago
I don't know, there are a few companies I've seen around lately that have an open source "core" with proprietary business add-ons. Teleport and Tailscale for example. The Tailscale CEO wrote a post about it recently that got traction on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29736369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29736369
ertian 5y ago
I think it's a bit of a pendulum. The enthusiasm and excitement for open source was largely driven by the locked-down environment of the time. Access to source and high-quality free software with source was an exhilarating novelty. But now we're kind of saturated, and used to it. Practically everything is free, it's not exciting anymore. New open source projects feel like just a drop in the bucket. Creators don't get the same sense of accomplishment from releasing new code. It may be necessary for a whole new generation to experience how shitty it is to be stuck with for-pay locked-down software that gradually rots beneath you, juggling library licences, phoning IT help lines for trivial problems, and having to ship every few years to some new (expensive) hotness.
johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago
> Chromium no longer has sync, so we currently have no usable browsers that support Google's stuff. Yes, Google has been not only anti-competitive, also very anti-FOSS. Google has been slowly making Chromium project more closed source. The original article of this thread is an evidence of Google's harmful effects on FOSS eco-system. Now other companies are also retreating on their open source effort because of Google.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

CyberRabbi 5y ago

> First off, we are huge fans of open source projects. This one sentence makes the whole post come off as disingenuous to me. Who isn’t a fan of free work?

remram 5y ago
The rest of the article explains why they won't release this product opensource even though they love it. It is not disingenuous. They released Mapperly under Apache-2.0, but I don't know if you read that far. If I tell you that "I love NodeJS but this specific project needs to run on embedded so I used C", it doesn't diminish my love of NodeJS or make it disingenuous. Love doesn't mean you'll always pick the thing no matter what, just a strong preference over the other possible options.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  > The rest of the article explains why they won't release opensource even though they love it. It is not disingenuous. No it doesn't. This is like someone saying, I love poor people and helping them but I love capitalism more because then I can charge those poor people in order for them to get help. Might as well just say what they really love which is money.
  - remram 5y ago
    Who is poor? How does needing money make you love capitalism? How do you personally pay rent if you feel that not giving every single thing for free is wrong?
  - CyberRabbi 5y ago
    > Might as well just say what they really love which is money. Thanks for understanding my point. They are just saying they “love open source” to ingratiate themselves to the reader but it’s a meaningless statement because who wouldn’t love free work? The entire article that follows comes off like a long-winded rationalization. They would be better off saying “we don’t open source our product because we don’t want to” I would respect that more and it would save me time.

otikik 5y ago

For an app like this, open sourcing non-business-critical parts of the app a perfectly valid way to go about it, like they are doing with the templating library. You still get visibility, testing and the occasional bugfix from the community. Another possible way to go about it is open-core: Open source version, with more advanced features on a closed-source solution. Contributors to the open source version have to waive off some of their rights in order for this to work, though. There are tools that automate most of that these days.

paxys 5y ago

> And even if we created or found an applicable license, who would enforce it? We are a small team of four software engineers from Switzerland and we have neither the knowledge nor the means to report license violators. Everyone who goes "just release it under XYZ license" misses this one key part. There are next to zero examples of small companies successfully enforcing their software copyright. It is expensive and takes a team of lawyers to do so.

abeyer 5y ago
Is this less true for commercial licenses, though? If someone's going to violate your licensing terms, they don't really care which license they violate, and it's not like it's hard to find pirated software.
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
  It's very hard to find pirated source code though.
  - abeyer 5y ago
    True in many cases, but I suspect the ones violating the license are more interested in getting free benefit of the software than they are in the philosophy of making source available.
  - yellowapple 5y ago
    It's almost trivial to create it yourself for anything written in C# or another .NET language. ILSpy and similar tools have existed for quite some time.
- lolinder 5y ago
  If a company has to go onto a pirate website to get a copy, that's going to throw up red flags in all but truly corrupt organizations. If, on the other hand, a piece of software can be downloaded directly off the company's website, it's pretty easy to gloss over the fine print that says "if you comply with terms X, Y, and Z".

quadrifoliate 5y ago

Here's a possibly novel take – the modern interview process for software developers is causing more and more projects to move to these non-FOSS licensing terms. "Wait, what? What could convoluted interview processes possibly have to do with licensing?" Well, developers need to make money somehow. In the past, releasing your software as FOSS allowed you to display your skills for software development and feature planning out in the open. Often, you'd be hired on the basis of those demonstrable skills at a paying job even if you didn't make money on the product itself. Multiple engineers I know went through very abbreviated hiring processes, being pretty quickly waved through if they had worked on FOSS in any significant capacity. Today, that's not the case at all, and any interview process for a high-paying job seems to have 5-6 rounds of arduous interviews, no exceptions. I have conducted around fifty or so interview processes for dev positions at a non-FAANG company, and "look at the candidate's FOSS experience" isn't on a single one of them. I don't think I could get any major FOSS contributor exempted from a single interview process at my company on the basis of their experience. The case of the Homebrew creator and Google is reasonably well-known [1]. Well, the natural response is going to be for them to work on their own product, and not open up the source code unless they get paid for it. Which is what software devs are doing these days, in increasing numbers. ---------------------------------------- [1] https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

abeyer 5y ago
Sounds plausible, but I dunno how prevalent that really is, though. Do that many people write OSS code just to get hired? I've never once made a contribution or started a project primarily because I thought it would get me a job or other professional recognition. I contribute to projects I think are worthwhile, to those that I benefit from and want to give back to, and to things that "scratch an itch" either personally or professionally.
- quadrifoliate 5y ago
  > Do that many people write OSS code just to get hired? No, I meant that in the past, it was a significant incentive to release code that you were already working on for a company or product as FOSS, i.e. "Even if this company or job doesn't work out, the open-sourced code is a good way to demonstrate my technical capability". I am talking real, commercially capable tools. I would say that not too many people wrote OSS code to get hired, but a high number of people might have open-sourced existing code on the basis that it might help them get hired some day. If you haven't tried to build a company or product based on your code, then this wouldn't apply to you (unlike the Kreya devs).

Mikeb85 5y ago

I don't see why there's a need for this explanation. If your end goal is to sell the software you make you shouldn't open source it. The main use case for open source is software you USE, you release it into the wild so others also add to it and it becomes better for everyone to USE. See programming languages or frameworks. You're not selling the OSS, you're getting others to improve the OSS that you then use to create a closed source product. Open sourcing software you intend to sell means it's either a trojan horse or someone else just sells it (in one case dishonest, in another case you get exploited).

skadamat 5y ago

There's open source backend software and there's full-stack / GUI oriented software and in my limited experience, I don't think the latter always makes sense. Smarter people than me have articulated their points about that: - https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-dozen-reasons/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op... - https://macwright.com/2021/12/07/sharing-in-the-presence-of-computers-and-corporations.html https://macwright.com/2021/12/07/sharing-in-the-presence-of-... "Placemark, the application, won’t be open source. I didn’t even consider the possibility: open sourcing the application layer of a product just doesn’t work. You get all the downsides of community support, white-labeling, process friction, confusion around why people have to pay, confusion around whether to use the open source version or the paid version, and none of the benefits." I think the dream is to open source the standards, protocols, backend engines, etc. But man, whenever you have to think heavily about a user interface, things get really hard. How do you decentralize design of something?

encryptluks2 5y ago

This should be titled, why Kreya doesn't actually understand or believe in open source.

aidenn0 5y ago

> Desktop apps are a special case As someone who remembers when most apps were desktop apps this seems a strange point. I suppose it's a better look than what the actual header for this section should be which is "we want to sell this for money"

boarnoah 5y ago

I wonder if a nice source available license comes about, similar to how we have common ones for FOSS like MIT which are well understood and easy to apply. A source available license allowing for personal modifications, sharing with other licensees, contributing fixes that might not be a priority to the dev is present with projects like Unreal Engine and a few other examples I can think of. However they are all bespoke licensing.

yellowapple 5y ago

The "we want to make money" argument is pretty weak when desktop software like Ardour demonstrates that it's still possible and feasible. The "we don't want to be stuck with a too-permissive license" argument is also pretty weak when there are a lot of licenses besides MIT (and when they, being the copyright holders, can relicense at any time; sure, the cat's out of the bag for already-released code, but for future versions that ain't necessarily the case).

Turing_Machine 5y ago
One counterexample doesn't make an argument "weak", if there are thousands of cases to the contrary. About what percentage of FOSS developers do you suppose make a living wage from their software? It's like pointing to a successful pop singer or pro athlete as an example of how it's possible to get rich doing those things. Possible? Certainly -- but only a minuscule percentage of the kids who start out in sports or music ever make it.
- yellowapple 5y ago
  > One counterexample doesn't make an argument "weak", if there are thousands of cases to the contrary. Are there "thousands of cases to the contrary", though? About what percentage of FOSS developers do you suppose even try making payment a prerequisite for a ready-to-run official binary? Or for that matter, about what percentage even attempts to monetize at all? That's what makes the argument weak: it reeks strongly of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".

almet 5y ago

It really seems they're trying to get things right, but are afraid of the competition. In my opinion this is because the company and the product is new to the market. Once they know that their income isn't tied to them being closed-source, they might change their position on this, or they will keep their customer locked-up because they're afraid of them running away. This seems to be missing the point : Freedom for the users on one side, and sharing knowledge on the other side. Here you have neither of the two and the only reason is fear. If your startup isn't successful and you have open-sourced your code, it's probably not because of the competition using your code, but because you're not solving a problem that people need to be solved.

dafty4 5y ago

TLDR: Money