4 ms·

Thank you for the input! I had a quick question. If we provided a dual license, Elastic V2 and SSPL, would that help? We're happy to clarify the meaning of th

by ozgune 3y ago

Thank you for the input! I had a quick question. If we provided a dual license, Elastic V2 and SSPL, would that help? We're happy to clarify the meaning of third-party as "commercially competing with our managed service" once we have a website. Still, we likely won't edit the Elastic V2 license since it might risk creating a new obscure license.

mindwok 3y ago
I think that would potentially help, but there's still ambiguity in the SSPL that might scare off some parties. But at least the SSPL would cover customers who aren't making modifications to the source code, but using the platform internally, which I think would make this option safe for the vast majority of use cases. Another way you could approach this would be a permissively licensed free version and different licenses for paid versions (basically, open core). My company uses this model, and I think it works extremely well because it means that large regulated enterprises or government customers (who don't use SaaS services) don't feel any hesitation to adopt the free tier, and then when they're ready to pay, their use case of an internal platform is already supported under the higher-level enterprise licenses. No legal risks involved here. I think these customers would be extremely well suited to your product because these customers are very risk-averse and the promise of having a neutral cloud vendor with an open codebase means less risk of vendor lock-in or a commercial rug-pull down the line. So I would urge you not to leave them out! In my experience, vendors often treat self-hosted installs like this as second class citizens, but large regulated enterprise and government customers often can't use SaaS services and are an enormous market that will love you if you make this easy for them.

4 ms·

Thank you for the input! I had a quick question. If we provided a dual license, Elastic V2 and SSPL, would that help? We're happy to clarify the meaning of th

by ozgune 3y ago

mindwok 3y ago
I think that would potentially help, but there's still ambiguity in the SSPL that might scare off some parties. But at least the SSPL would cover customers who aren't making modifications to the source code, but using the platform internally, which I think would make this option safe for the vast majority of use cases. Another way you could approach this would be a permissively licensed free version and different licenses for paid versions (basically, open core). My company uses this model, and I think it works extremely well because it means that large regulated enterprises or government customers (who don't use SaaS services) don't feel any hesitation to adopt the free tier, and then when they're ready to pay, their use case of an internal platform is already supported under the higher-level enterprise licenses. No legal risks involved here. I think these customers would be extremely well suited to your product because these customers are very risk-averse and the promise of having a neutral cloud vendor with an open codebase means less risk of vendor lock-in or a commercial rug-pull down the line. So I would urge you not to leave them out! In my experience, vendors often treat self-hosted installs like this as second class citizens, but large regulated enterprise and government customers often can't use SaaS services and are an enormous market that will love you if you make this easy for them.