7 ms·

What's wrong with monetization? You understand that OSS's significant problem is a lack of funding, where authors don't want or don't know how to monetize their

by mirzap 3y ago

What's wrong with monetization? You understand that OSS's significant problem is a lack of funding, where authors don't want or don't know how to monetize their product? Sentry looks like a good model for OSS, and it's proof that you can make a living from OSS. I also don't have anything against "enterprise features" for which you need a license, while most features are available in OSS version.

vmatsiiako 3y ago
This is indeed what we are going for. We want to provide a very predictable license that gives most of the features for free for developers while keeping the managerial features paid to make sure that we can support development and maintenance of Infisical.
Znafon 3y ago
> What's wrong with monetization? You understand that OSS's significant problem is a lack of funding, where authors don't want or don't know how to monetize their product? > Sentry looks like a good model for OSS, and it's proof that you can make a living from OSS. Sentry is using the BSL, the very same license that HashiCorp has switched to but that change has not been received well.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  If Sentry used BSL from the beginning, and refrains from calling itself an "open source company", that's just another company doing its thing. It's the bait and switch and bullshit language ("evolving open source") that gets people riled up.
  - Znafon 3y ago
    Sentry has not been using BSL since the beginning.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Open Source is not a business model. It's marketing, for sure, but you can't make money solely by giving away your product. Every single open source company eventually learns this when they have a strong competitor. Eventually you are forced to stop being open source, because no business wants to compete solely on the strength of their service quality. Moreover: a community is antithetical to a corporation's interest in the software. Corporations don't give a shit what people want changed in the code, for good reason: their purpose is to make money, not make good software. So business source always ends up annoying and limited while community open source provides the functions the users need, in the way they want them. So, yeah, you can make money while letting people read your source code. But the actual quality of the end result, the user's happiness, the ability to contribute to the whole thing, is much different in a real community project.
- EspressoGPT 3y ago
  > Every single open source company eventually learns this when they have a strong competitor. Many of the open source companies are their own strongest competitor, see HashiCorp.
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    If they aren't, then someone else will be. That is always worse for them. Either that or they have to go at least semi-proprietary.
    - ritesofbryan 3y ago
      I agree with this. TBH my view is that the frustration towards open source companies around changing their licenses is sort of misguided. If there's a bad guy in the room, it's AWS. AWS is very good at commercializing open source -- they make literally billions of dollars doing so: Elasticache (Redis), AWS Managed Elastic, RDS etc. Changing the license becomes one of the only ways to hold them off, and the companies that have done so more proactively have fared much better. I think everyone agrees that in an ideal world this wouldn't have to happen, and indeed it didn't really happen until recently when the AWS thing started to become an issue. Ultimately, SOMEONE is going to leverage the open source for financial gain. So, the question becomes which would you rather have: - The company commercializing the open source (which is in almost every successful case includes the original creator(s) as a founder, CEO, or employee) benefit from the projects success, which in turn allows them to make further investment in the project. - AWS benefit from the projects success and (generally speaking) contribute very little back. Of course, there are plenty of projects that are NOT venture funded that see great success through purely community development. That's great! I just think commercial open source is beneficial as well, especially for larger more complex projects (databases, etc.) that need the funding. The two are not mutually exclusive. I am also of the belief that the additional funding (both from revenue and from venture investment) that goes into these projects gives them the ability to hire more people, which in turn makes the software better for everyone. Disclaimer: I am investor that invests predominantly in commercial open source companies. Previously I was developer who used a lot of open source, which is what led me here.
josephcsible 3y ago
There's nothing wrong with monetization. There's just something wrong with making parts of the code proprietary. There'd be nothing wrong with monetizing by picking a copyleft license and selling exceptions, selling hosting, or selling support, for example.
- vmatsiiako 3y ago
  Curious why you think it's the wrong way to do it?
  - josephcsible 3y ago
    Because then you're making and monetizing a proprietary product rather than actually monetizing FOSS.
    - vmatsiiako 3y ago
      I'm not sure if I understand your point. OSS != FOSS https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-07-open-core-is-misunderstood-business-model/ https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-07-open-core-is-misun...
      - josephcsible 3y ago
        > OSS != FOSS While this statement is technically true, I don't think it has any relevance to the topic at hand. While there are some relatively obscure licenses that are OSS but not FOSS (e.g., the Sybase Open Watcom Public License), isn't everything under discussion here either both free and open source, or neither free nor open source? In particular, the "core" of Open Core is both, but the extras are neither.
- nine_k 3y ago
  Dual licensing (copyleft + commercial) has been a thing for a long time. Open Core is also a thing, and I think it's better than BSL because at least the core part is truly open.
candiddevmike 3y ago
Sentry isn't OSS...
- vmatsiiako 3y ago
  This is what Sentry says: https://open.sentry.io/ https://open.sentry.io/
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    Corporate blog spam doesn't magically make the BSL OSS: https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ > 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.
    - Pet_Ant 3y ago
      I would argue (and have previously) that BSL is open source, it's just being held in escrow. So it has been released to open source... just that source hasn't been released to the public. (BSL triggers after a max of 4 years into irrevocable OSS). I think the real issue is that people want more community driven OSS. Stuff that is collaboratively built and not built for a commercial purpose. They want something I think along the lines of KDE where there are paid people to work on it, but it's also contributed to by a community and there isn't someone constantly trying to a make a buck off of it.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - nylonstrung 3y ago
        That funding still requires corporate patronage, which is overwhelmingly from companies that are monetizing via proprietary software Where is this community funding supposed to come from? Would OP here really personally donate to a team making a secrets management tool? It's turtles all the way down
nurple 3y ago
See, the problem is that you have it backwards. OSS's significant "problem" is those attempting to levarage it for funding. If you want funding, don't do open source; you'll make all the precious money that those who have it think it might be worth, and you won't look like a dick when you pull it back because you're not making enough. If you want to write software, in a community, for the betterment of that everyone, no matter what anyone else does with that software, then release it as open source. Can you still make a comfortable living writing open source software? Perhaps, but if that's your goal, you're doing it wrong(tm).

by mirzap 3y ago

vmatsiiako 3y ago

This is indeed what we are going for. We want to provide a very predictable license that gives most of the features for free for developers while keeping the managerial features paid to make sure that we can support development and maintenance of Infisical.

Znafon 3y ago

> What's wrong with monetization? You understand that OSS's significant problem is a lack of funding, where authors don't want or don't know how to monetize their product? > Sentry looks like a good model for OSS, and it's proof that you can make a living from OSS. Sentry is using the BSL, the very same license that HashiCorp has switched to but that change has not been received well.

yencabulator 3y ago
If Sentry used BSL from the beginning, and refrains from calling itself an "open source company", that's just another company doing its thing. It's the bait and switch and bullshit language ("evolving open source") that gets people riled up.
- Znafon 3y ago
  Sentry has not been using BSL since the beginning.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Open Source is not a business model. It's marketing, for sure, but you can't make money solely by giving away your product. Every single open source company eventually learns this when they have a strong competitor. Eventually you are forced to stop being open source, because no business wants to compete solely on the strength of their service quality. Moreover: a community is antithetical to a corporation's interest in the software. Corporations don't give a shit what people want changed in the code, for good reason: their purpose is to make money, not make good software. So business source always ends up annoying and limited while community open source provides the functions the users need, in the way they want them. So, yeah, you can make money while letting people read your source code. But the actual quality of the end result, the user's happiness, the ability to contribute to the whole thing, is much different in a real community project.

EspressoGPT 3y ago
> Every single open source company eventually learns this when they have a strong competitor. Many of the open source companies are their own strongest competitor, see HashiCorp.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  If they aren't, then someone else will be. That is always worse for them. Either that or they have to go at least semi-proprietary.
  - ritesofbryan 3y ago
    I agree with this. TBH my view is that the frustration towards open source companies around changing their licenses is sort of misguided. If there's a bad guy in the room, it's AWS. AWS is very good at commercializing open source -- they make literally billions of dollars doing so: Elasticache (Redis), AWS Managed Elastic, RDS etc. Changing the license becomes one of the only ways to hold them off, and the companies that have done so more proactively have fared much better. I think everyone agrees that in an ideal world this wouldn't have to happen, and indeed it didn't really happen until recently when the AWS thing started to become an issue. Ultimately, SOMEONE is going to leverage the open source for financial gain. So, the question becomes which would you rather have: - The company commercializing the open source (which is in almost every successful case includes the original creator(s) as a founder, CEO, or employee) benefit from the projects success, which in turn allows them to make further investment in the project. - AWS benefit from the projects success and (generally speaking) contribute very little back. Of course, there are plenty of projects that are NOT venture funded that see great success through purely community development. That's great! I just think commercial open source is beneficial as well, especially for larger more complex projects (databases, etc.) that need the funding. The two are not mutually exclusive. I am also of the belief that the additional funding (both from revenue and from venture investment) that goes into these projects gives them the ability to hire more people, which in turn makes the software better for everyone. Disclaimer: I am investor that invests predominantly in commercial open source companies. Previously I was developer who used a lot of open source, which is what led me here.

josephcsible 3y ago

There's nothing wrong with monetization. There's just something wrong with making parts of the code proprietary. There'd be nothing wrong with monetizing by picking a copyleft license and selling exceptions, selling hosting, or selling support, for example.

vmatsiiako 3y ago
Curious why you think it's the wrong way to do it?
- josephcsible 3y ago
  Because then you're making and monetizing a proprietary product rather than actually monetizing FOSS.
  - vmatsiiako 3y ago
    I'm not sure if I understand your point. OSS != FOSS https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-07-open-core-is-misunderstood-business-model/ https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-07-open-core-is-misun...
    - josephcsible 3y ago
      > OSS != FOSS While this statement is technically true, I don't think it has any relevance to the topic at hand. While there are some relatively obscure licenses that are OSS but not FOSS (e.g., the Sybase Open Watcom Public License), isn't everything under discussion here either both free and open source, or neither free nor open source? In particular, the "core" of Open Core is both, but the extras are neither.
nine_k 3y ago
Dual licensing (copyleft + commercial) has been a thing for a long time. Open Core is also a thing, and I think it's better than BSL because at least the core part is truly open.

candiddevmike 3y ago

Sentry isn't OSS...

vmatsiiako 3y ago
This is what Sentry says: https://open.sentry.io/ https://open.sentry.io/
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Corporate blog spam doesn't magically make the BSL OSS: https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ > 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.
  - Pet_Ant 3y ago
    I would argue (and have previously) that BSL is open source, it's just being held in escrow. So it has been released to open source... just that source hasn't been released to the public. (BSL triggers after a max of 4 years into irrevocable OSS). I think the real issue is that people want more community driven OSS. Stuff that is collaboratively built and not built for a commercial purpose. They want something I think along the lines of KDE where there are paid people to work on it, but it's also contributed to by a community and there isn't someone constantly trying to a make a buck off of it.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - nylonstrung 3y ago
      That funding still requires corporate patronage, which is overwhelmingly from companies that are monetizing via proprietary software Where is this community funding supposed to come from? Would OP here really personally donate to a team making a secrets management tool? It's turtles all the way down

nurple 3y ago

See, the problem is that you have it backwards. OSS's significant "problem" is those attempting to levarage it for funding. If you want funding, don't do open source; you'll make all the precious money that those who have it think it might be worth, and you won't look like a dick when you pull it back because you're not making enough. If you want to write software, in a community, for the betterment of that everyone, no matter what anyone else does with that software, then release it as open source. Can you still make a comfortable living writing open source software? Perhaps, but if that's your goal, you're doing it wrong(tm).