7 ms·

I'm not sure feature withholding has traditionally worked out well in the developer space. The churn rate for tooling is so high that if Earthly were to intenti

I'm not sure feature withholding has traditionally worked out well in the developer space. The churn rate for tooling is so high that if Earthly were to intentionally cripple their product I'm sure the majority of developers would just move on to other inferior, but free, options (eg. taskfile). Maybe those that remain could be converted successfully but it's quite a gamble. A great turn around story in recent times though is probably Docker. But that required them to abandon strict open source and make controversial license/product changes.

gabereiser 3y ago
Yeah, not suggesting feature withholding per se, but a differentiator on why one would buy vs run the OSS build.
- staunton 3y ago
  What's the difference?
  - gabereiser 3y ago
    plugins, hardware, hosting, support, there's a number of ways to offer a service for an open source project. Open Core models come to mind. Another is not having enterprise SSO as part of the core. Or not having clustering. Something that would make a VP think twice about adopting your open source solution vs using you as a vendor.
    - justin_oaks 3y ago
      I know these are examples, so I don't want to pick on you too much, but I have one nitpick: Reserving SSO for enterprise customers is awful. Please don't do it. See https://sso.tax/ https://sso.tax/ for details but I'll quote this from it "SSO is a core security requirement for any company with more than five employees"
      - rhaps0dy 3y ago
        But it should be OK to reserve SSO for paying customers.
      - imiric 3y ago
        If a company requires SSO, they'll surely have a budget for paying for the products and services they use. The majority of OSS users won't have this requirement, and likely won't have the budget to pay for commercial features. So it doesn't make sense to give away a service that has a maintenance cost to everyone, as long as it's fairly priced.
      - gabereiser 3y ago
        If you have more than 5 employees, I’m sending you a sales rep to sell SSO to you.
        justin_oaks 3y ago
        I see, I see. The world isn't fair. We have 5 employees and we want SSO but don't need SSO. So we'll go without it. It's annoying for us but it allows your business to exist because enterprise needs SSO.
        mavelikara 3y ago
        I am going to the competitor. I am paying for the software, but I don’t want your “enterprise tier”, which is really designed for 1000+ employee companies. BTW, I did just this this morning. The AE came back to offer the enterprise package for the price of the mid-tier package.
        Xymist 3y ago
        If I have to go through a sales rep to try or buy your product, I'm going with a competitor. Zero touch is a feature, upsell opportunities are cancer.
      - BoorishBears 3y ago
        As others are pointing out, once you've grown big enough that you can't trust everyone with the keys go the kingdom: enterprise pricing is for you. SSO Tax is a fun meme, but it misses the point: Whether it's 5 people or even 3, you've scaled your business enough to hire people who aren't in the inner circle. That's a fair place to consider you an enterprise.
    - caloique 3y ago
      Co-founder of BoxyHQ here - We've crafted an open-source enterprise SSO because we firmly believe that robust security shouldn't be a privilege limited to large organizations. Ideally, essential enterprise-level features like this should become commonplace for all. While we acknowledge the reasons behind SSO being in the enterprise tier, we're all on a collective journey to enhance our security measures. Open Core models are indeed a good option (my preference), yet the dynamics vary across solutions and industries. It's up to each of us to explore, experiment, and discover what resonates with our market. In doing so, we can foster growth while maintaining our commitment to supporting the community in the long run.
      - gabereiser 3y ago
        Well stated. I was merely showing how one could implement an open core strategy. I’m a firm believer in SSO for all (and not limited to social platforms or GitHub).
imiric 3y ago
For the open core model to work, the OSS product should be standalone and featureful. If users feel like it's just used to advertise a commercial product, it doesn't work. And the commercial product should offer value-added services and features that are not strictly required for the base OSS product. These should be features directed towards advanced or corporate users, and preferably something that competitors lack, or don't do a good job of. It's very tricky to balance the open core model correctly, which is why not many companies get it right. You need to invest equally, if not more, in the OSS product, and make sure users are happy with it before you even mention a commercial addon. Grafana is another example of companies that understand and do this well.
BlackjackCF 3y ago
I think a nice compromise is the CircleCI/Travis model of providing limited build credits/hours. If you’re a small shop or single dev, you can use the core product for free, with the hope that you’d convert to a paying user if your business grows past the free constraint.
tazjin 3y ago
In this particular case, developers could also move on to a superior and completely open alternative (Nix), so making even a semi-closed alternative with much fewer people contributing etc. was already a hard sell.
- JustLurking2022 3y ago
  Seriously, is there an email distro or something to notify Nix users when there's a new post to go troll? It's not suitable for 90%+ of users, which seems a far cry from superior.
  - tazjin 3y ago
    It's just very noticeable when half of what the industry seems to spend its time on is solved problems. You and all the others have to learn why touching the hot stove is a bad idea the same way most children do. It's frustrating to observe. It's fine to criticise Nix for its various flaws, but any suggestion of an "alternative" that has learned nothing from it is just a collective waste of time.
    - dnfjficiv 3y ago
      We get it, nix is a better mousetrap. Why are people ignoring you though? Because if it really was the promised land we'd all be there already. Must be something important y'all are missing about the good old fashioned hot stoves.
      - tazjin 3y ago
        I'm trembling at how much you're ignoring me!
    - belmont_sup 3y ago
      I’ve recently had to learn some nix to build an IHP app (Haskell framework). Most hosting providers require a dockerfile and/or image. I couldn’t get nix to build an image on time within the hosting providers’ CI. So I gave up. For any other project, I can spend half an hour max to get a decent deployable build. The trade offs is Nix doesn’t seem to work for me.
hnlmorg 3y ago
> I'm not sure feature withholding has traditionally worked out well in the developer space. It’s worked well for GitHub, Slack, and pretty much every service that only offer SSO behind enterprise subscriptions. The trick is to offer enough to make people productive but not so much that there isn’t a worthwhile upgrade path.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Neither GitHub nor slack are open source
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    Both GitHub and Slack have free tiers. Same principle, different software license.
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      It isn’t the same principle though. Slack and GitHub can sell data to make a profit etc but the problem with open source is people can just host it themselves meaning the creators don’t even have that option.
      - hnlmorg 3y ago
        Plenty of organisations prefer to have managed options and thus pay for SaaS, even from open source vendors, rather than hosting their own. Also you’re getting too caught up in specifics and missing the broader point. You want open source examples? How about Nexus, Redhat, nginx, prettier much all of Hashicorps offerings, basically half of why AWS resell. The real issue with commercial open source isn’t restricting access to customers, it’s restricting access to resellers. As demonstrated with the examples above.
- dpeckett 3y ago
  True (for web apps and multiuser applications). Earthly is a single binary CLI on top of Docker buildkit so it's a bit trickier for them.
caseyohara 3y ago
> I'm not sure feature withholding has traditionally worked out well in the developer space. I think it's worked out well for Sidekiq (https://sidekiq.org https://sidekiq.org). I really like their model of layering valuable features between the OSS / Pro / Enterprise licenses. The trick is you have to do that very early on. Nerfing your open source offering by making some existing features paid-only is always going to get some backlash.
ljm 3y ago
The open source version has to be good and valuable enough for you to bring it in as a dependency in a basic setup, and then the paid versions provide support for larger scale setups where the requirements are a bit different. There are many ways to do that, depending on what you're offering. Limits and quotas are easy enough.
pjmlp 3y ago
That is why most developer products have gone back to the timesharing days.

gabereiser 3y ago

Yeah, not suggesting feature withholding per se, but a differentiator on why one would buy vs run the OSS build.

staunton 3y ago
What's the difference?
- gabereiser 3y ago
  plugins, hardware, hosting, support, there's a number of ways to offer a service for an open source project. Open Core models come to mind. Another is not having enterprise SSO as part of the core. Or not having clustering. Something that would make a VP think twice about adopting your open source solution vs using you as a vendor.
  - justin_oaks 3y ago
    I know these are examples, so I don't want to pick on you too much, but I have one nitpick: Reserving SSO for enterprise customers is awful. Please don't do it. See https://sso.tax/ https://sso.tax/ for details but I'll quote this from it "SSO is a core security requirement for any company with more than five employees"
    - rhaps0dy 3y ago
      But it should be OK to reserve SSO for paying customers.
    - imiric 3y ago
      If a company requires SSO, they'll surely have a budget for paying for the products and services they use. The majority of OSS users won't have this requirement, and likely won't have the budget to pay for commercial features. So it doesn't make sense to give away a service that has a maintenance cost to everyone, as long as it's fairly priced.
    - gabereiser 3y ago
      If you have more than 5 employees, I’m sending you a sales rep to sell SSO to you.
      - justin_oaks 3y ago
        I see, I see. The world isn't fair. We have 5 employees and we want SSO but don't need SSO. So we'll go without it. It's annoying for us but it allows your business to exist because enterprise needs SSO.
      - mavelikara 3y ago
        I am going to the competitor. I am paying for the software, but I don’t want your “enterprise tier”, which is really designed for 1000+ employee companies. BTW, I did just this this morning. The AE came back to offer the enterprise package for the price of the mid-tier package.
      - Xymist 3y ago
        If I have to go through a sales rep to try or buy your product, I'm going with a competitor. Zero touch is a feature, upsell opportunities are cancer.
    - BoorishBears 3y ago
      As others are pointing out, once you've grown big enough that you can't trust everyone with the keys go the kingdom: enterprise pricing is for you. SSO Tax is a fun meme, but it misses the point: Whether it's 5 people or even 3, you've scaled your business enough to hire people who aren't in the inner circle. That's a fair place to consider you an enterprise.
  - caloique 3y ago
    Co-founder of BoxyHQ here - We've crafted an open-source enterprise SSO because we firmly believe that robust security shouldn't be a privilege limited to large organizations. Ideally, essential enterprise-level features like this should become commonplace for all. While we acknowledge the reasons behind SSO being in the enterprise tier, we're all on a collective journey to enhance our security measures. Open Core models are indeed a good option (my preference), yet the dynamics vary across solutions and industries. It's up to each of us to explore, experiment, and discover what resonates with our market. In doing so, we can foster growth while maintaining our commitment to supporting the community in the long run.
    - gabereiser 3y ago
      Well stated. I was merely showing how one could implement an open core strategy. I’m a firm believer in SSO for all (and not limited to social platforms or GitHub).

imiric 3y ago

For the open core model to work, the OSS product should be standalone and featureful. If users feel like it's just used to advertise a commercial product, it doesn't work. And the commercial product should offer value-added services and features that are not strictly required for the base OSS product. These should be features directed towards advanced or corporate users, and preferably something that competitors lack, or don't do a good job of. It's very tricky to balance the open core model correctly, which is why not many companies get it right. You need to invest equally, if not more, in the OSS product, and make sure users are happy with it before you even mention a commercial addon. Grafana is another example of companies that understand and do this well.

BlackjackCF 3y ago

I think a nice compromise is the CircleCI/Travis model of providing limited build credits/hours. If you’re a small shop or single dev, you can use the core product for free, with the hope that you’d convert to a paying user if your business grows past the free constraint.

tazjin 3y ago

In this particular case, developers could also move on to a superior and completely open alternative (Nix), so making even a semi-closed alternative with much fewer people contributing etc. was already a hard sell.

JustLurking2022 3y ago
Seriously, is there an email distro or something to notify Nix users when there's a new post to go troll? It's not suitable for 90%+ of users, which seems a far cry from superior.
- tazjin 3y ago
  It's just very noticeable when half of what the industry seems to spend its time on is solved problems. You and all the others have to learn why touching the hot stove is a bad idea the same way most children do. It's frustrating to observe. It's fine to criticise Nix for its various flaws, but any suggestion of an "alternative" that has learned nothing from it is just a collective waste of time.
  - dnfjficiv 3y ago
    We get it, nix is a better mousetrap. Why are people ignoring you though? Because if it really was the promised land we'd all be there already. Must be something important y'all are missing about the good old fashioned hot stoves.
    - tazjin 3y ago
      I'm trembling at how much you're ignoring me!
  - belmont_sup 3y ago
    I’ve recently had to learn some nix to build an IHP app (Haskell framework). Most hosting providers require a dockerfile and/or image. I couldn’t get nix to build an image on time within the hosting providers’ CI. So I gave up. For any other project, I can spend half an hour max to get a decent deployable build. The trade offs is Nix doesn’t seem to work for me.

hnlmorg 3y ago

> I'm not sure feature withholding has traditionally worked out well in the developer space. It’s worked well for GitHub, Slack, and pretty much every service that only offer SSO behind enterprise subscriptions. The trick is to offer enough to make people productive but not so much that there isn’t a worthwhile upgrade path.

edgyquant 3y ago
Neither GitHub nor slack are open source
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  Both GitHub and Slack have free tiers. Same principle, different software license.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    It isn’t the same principle though. Slack and GitHub can sell data to make a profit etc but the problem with open source is people can just host it themselves meaning the creators don’t even have that option.
    - hnlmorg 3y ago
      Plenty of organisations prefer to have managed options and thus pay for SaaS, even from open source vendors, rather than hosting their own. Also you’re getting too caught up in specifics and missing the broader point. You want open source examples? How about Nexus, Redhat, nginx, prettier much all of Hashicorps offerings, basically half of why AWS resell. The real issue with commercial open source isn’t restricting access to customers, it’s restricting access to resellers. As demonstrated with the examples above.
dpeckett 3y ago
True (for web apps and multiuser applications). Earthly is a single binary CLI on top of Docker buildkit so it's a bit trickier for them.

caseyohara 3y ago

> I'm not sure feature withholding has traditionally worked out well in the developer space. I think it's worked out well for Sidekiq (https://sidekiq.org https://sidekiq.org). I really like their model of layering valuable features between the OSS / Pro / Enterprise licenses. The trick is you have to do that very early on. Nerfing your open source offering by making some existing features paid-only is always going to get some backlash.

ljm 3y ago

The open source version has to be good and valuable enough for you to bring it in as a dependency in a basic setup, and then the paid versions provide support for larger scale setups where the requirements are a bit different. There are many ways to do that, depending on what you're offering. Limits and quotas are easy enough.

pjmlp 3y ago

That is why most developer products have gone back to the timesharing days.