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The author calls out they are specifically talking about open source solutions that compete with paid offerings. IMO, the jury is very much still out on whether
by mindwok 3y ago
The author calls out they are specifically talking about open source solutions that compete with paid offerings. IMO, the jury is very much still out on whether open source "wins" in this regard. In the past decade we've seen a huge rise of open source products, and in the last 5 years or so we've seen many of them move away from that. MongoDB, the Hashicorp stack, Elastic, Red Hat, MinIO, the list goes on.
There are not that many truly open source, commercially competitive products remaining and many of them are fighting to prove it's a viable business model.
- mholt 3y agoThe Caddy project is fighting to show it can work. We are having moderate success. I just gave a talk about this a couple weeks ago at an internal company event and will be doing so again at GoWest in a few weeks. The premise is that open source licenses are what they are: they grant freedom, but not other things that companies would pay money for. Proprietary licenses do offer what companies need, but at the cost of freedom. I believe there is a third model that works in the middle without compromising freedom or reliability. By staying open source and filling the gap of what companies need through sponsorships, I think this may work for some. I'm currently redesigning the Caddy website to emphasize this and hope it will work!
- mindwok 3y agoI love Caddy and have shilled to everyone I know, so thanks for your great work. I'm keen to hear more about your model, because I think the influx of companies abandoning their open source roots has shown the problems with the current approach. I am rooting for you folks!
- mholt 3y agoThank you!! Appreciate that encouragement.
- revendell_elf 3y agoCaddy is far more simpler to understand than any any other server software. Thanks for building Caddy!
- candiddevmike 3y agoSponsorware is/eventually becomes basically ad supported, it's not really a new thing.
- mholt 3y agoNah we tried that already -- this is different.
- bawolff 3y agoIsn't that the point of this article? Its not that open source will neccesarily win, just that if it does, it will do so based on the strengths the author enumerated, not by undercutting the competition on price.
- EMIRELADERO 3y agoHow do VLC and Blender manage?
- 3np 3y agoVLC development is primarily funded by Naver (Space Green), I believe. Could be misinformed. http://www.videolan.org/contribute.html http://www.videolan.org/contribute.html
- justinclift 3y agoBlender has an optional SaaS solution ("Blender Cloud": https://cloud.blender.org/about https://cloud.blender.org/about) which people pay for to fund things. There's also the Blender Foundation, which accepts donations and funds things too.
- pjmlp 3y agoBlender was a commercial product, and when it was open sourced many of the existing customers kept supporting the project.
- justinclift 3y ago> MinIO Looking at the MinIO repo, they seem to have changed from APL2 to AGPL3. Is that the "move away" from Open Source you're meaning in relation to them?
- mindwok 3y agoYeah that’s what I was referring to. Still open source, but the move was controversial because it was taking away some freedoms from users of the previous license.