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> 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
by 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 agoNeither GitHub nor slack are open source
- hnlmorg 3y agoBoth GitHub and Slack have free tiers. Same principle, different software license.
- edgyquant 3y agoIt 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 agoPlenty 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 agoTrue (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.
- hnlmorg 3y agoI’m not claiming it’s easy. Just that withholding features while still offering free tiers is a tried and tested business model that has demonstrated a lot of success for a lot of companies.