7 ms·

> My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. The number if places that have succeeded in both is vani

by jraph 3y ago

> My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. The number if places that have succeeded in both is vanishingly small. I would suggest the contrary: if you want to build a company and believe open source is the right way to do it, please do try! We don't have enough open source companies, we need more successful examples of this. It's hard and there are traps one needs to not fall into. I personally think VC money is one of the biggest traps, it's absolutely critical you keep control of where and how the companies is going. If you don't have investors to feed, you may make enough money to pay the employees with a good strategy. You can even manage without open core, which incentivizes pushing the useful features outside the open core.

konschubert 3y ago
Your recommendation is based on what you want for yourself, not based on what’s good for the person starting the company.
- jraph 3y ago
  I suggested, I didn't recommend. I chose my words carefully. Under the condition that the person believes open source is the right thing to do. You need to believe in what you do when you start a company. I also suggest based on the fact that I do work for such a company, which has been successful. Next year is its 20th anniversary. It's an amazing place to work at. You can create amazing work environments out of open source. And while it's quite rare, it's also far from being the only one. Another commenter says that I seem to ignore the consequences of a failure. I don't. However, I'm surrounded by open source companies and they all seem to be great places to work at. Join us! When you believe in open source, being able to work in agreement with these values is amazing. I can't imagine how stronger that must be for the one would indeed founded a whole business like this. It's time people stopped spreading this belief that open source and sustainable business cannot go together.
  - Arch-TK 3y ago
    Where do I find these open source companies? In the UK it seems like they don't exist. But maybe I am looking in the wrong places.
    - jraph 3y ago
      I believe New Vector Ltd, which builds Element [1], is in the UK. You also have Collabora [2] and probably others as well. If you are willing to work from home, you could join one from France or Germany where many of them are established, the time difference is small. You get to work in an international setting which is also relatively small size. When I was looking for a job, I actually listed open source software I may enjoy working on and find who was behind. I ended up running into my current company at an open source event, so you might also want to go to one of these. [1] https://element.io/ https://element.io/ [2] https://collabora.com/ https://collabora.com/
radiator 3y ago
> please do try! This is not very convincing as a reply to the risks pointed out in the previous post. The choice of the word "try" seemingly recognizes the risk of failure, but you seem to ignore the serious consequences of such a failure for founder and employees. I mean, this is not a game.
- sh79 3y ago
  Building a company inherently carries a risk of failure with it. You seem to be taking it the wrong way, you really shouldn't be building your company based on a few opinions of HN comments, nor it's their responsibility to outline the full extent of risks involved.
  - rmbyrro 3y ago
    The point is that Open Source, by design, drammatically increases the likelihood of failure. It's already hard to build a successful business. Odds are already thin for you to succeed. Why choose a model that worsens it? Open Source was not created as a funding source to for-profit ventures. That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and the purpose of Open Source.
    - jraph 3y ago
      > That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and the purpose of Open Source. You are misguided. Here's what the company that employs me does: - develop an open source product. Open to contributions, but most of the dev is done by employees. - sell support and consulting on this product - sell pre-packaged open source extensions to this product, with support Totally withing the free software / open source spirit. The world gets great open source software for free (not open core: truly and completely open source), and the business behind it is sustainable as well. We also donate to some open source projects that we use, chosen by employees. At some point, if you want open source to take over, you need it to grow and strive, and having it supported by business is a great way of getting this. The world probably cannot be run only by side projects. Not saying that all open source companies behave this well, but it's not an impossible outcome.
wavemode 3y ago
There are four business models that I believe are sustainable for open source development. 1. Solo developer (or small group), funded via e.g. Patreon 2. Non-profit funded by sponsorships and donations 3. For-profit but the software is free; the company charges for support and/or cloud services 4. Open collective, where donations fund bounties that are paid out to people who contribute patches In other words, I think the only models that can really work are models where you genuinely don't care about other companies taking your code and using it for their own purposes. (This shouldn't be surprising - that's literally the whole point of open source!) When I see companies trying something other than these four business models (usually because they desire more money than being a non-profit can offer) I inevitably see companies that might as well just not be open-source companies, because their licensing has to be restrictive for them to compete.
- jraph 3y ago
  Consulting on the product is another important income, possibly higher than support. It can be: - developing features or bug fixes in the open source product or an extension that are needed now by the customer - developing a custom project (not in the open, or actually sometimes in the open) on top of your open source product for the customer - supporting the customer for some integration with your open source product. You can also try to sell paid extensions (that are still open source). That would be the case for XWiki Pro apps, or many WordPress extensions. There's another way to do it, is develop your open source and sell your developer expertise for unrelated customer projects. I've worked somewhere working like this, but don't really believe it works well because you are not actually spending time in your project when you are doing this, and you are not incentivized to develop your own product when you do this. You are basically a consulting company. But you can still decide to do a bit of this. Consulting and support can work for solo developers, but that might push quite some pressure and make it difficult to disconnect depending on the way you do this.
- nojvek 3y ago
  There’s a 5th one. While not fully open source companies, they have a whole bundle of open source libraries and packages that don’t threaten their core business. Meta does OS well for their scale. React, Llama, PyTorch come to mind. For MS: Typescript, vscode, .net come to mind.

by jraph 3y ago

konschubert 3y ago

Your recommendation is based on what you want for yourself, not based on what’s good for the person starting the company.

jraph 3y ago
I suggested, I didn't recommend. I chose my words carefully. Under the condition that the person believes open source is the right thing to do. You need to believe in what you do when you start a company. I also suggest based on the fact that I do work for such a company, which has been successful. Next year is its 20th anniversary. It's an amazing place to work at. You can create amazing work environments out of open source. And while it's quite rare, it's also far from being the only one. Another commenter says that I seem to ignore the consequences of a failure. I don't. However, I'm surrounded by open source companies and they all seem to be great places to work at. Join us! When you believe in open source, being able to work in agreement with these values is amazing. I can't imagine how stronger that must be for the one would indeed founded a whole business like this. It's time people stopped spreading this belief that open source and sustainable business cannot go together.
- Arch-TK 3y ago
  Where do I find these open source companies? In the UK it seems like they don't exist. But maybe I am looking in the wrong places.
  - jraph 3y ago
    I believe New Vector Ltd, which builds Element [1], is in the UK. You also have Collabora [2] and probably others as well. If you are willing to work from home, you could join one from France or Germany where many of them are established, the time difference is small. You get to work in an international setting which is also relatively small size. When I was looking for a job, I actually listed open source software I may enjoy working on and find who was behind. I ended up running into my current company at an open source event, so you might also want to go to one of these. [1] https://element.io/ https://element.io/ [2] https://collabora.com/ https://collabora.com/

radiator 3y ago

> please do try! This is not very convincing as a reply to the risks pointed out in the previous post. The choice of the word "try" seemingly recognizes the risk of failure, but you seem to ignore the serious consequences of such a failure for founder and employees. I mean, this is not a game.

sh79 3y ago
Building a company inherently carries a risk of failure with it. You seem to be taking it the wrong way, you really shouldn't be building your company based on a few opinions of HN comments, nor it's their responsibility to outline the full extent of risks involved.
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  The point is that Open Source, by design, drammatically increases the likelihood of failure. It's already hard to build a successful business. Odds are already thin for you to succeed. Why choose a model that worsens it? Open Source was not created as a funding source to for-profit ventures. That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and the purpose of Open Source.
  - jraph 3y ago
    > That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and the purpose of Open Source. You are misguided. Here's what the company that employs me does: - develop an open source product. Open to contributions, but most of the dev is done by employees. - sell support and consulting on this product - sell pre-packaged open source extensions to this product, with support Totally withing the free software / open source spirit. The world gets great open source software for free (not open core: truly and completely open source), and the business behind it is sustainable as well. We also donate to some open source projects that we use, chosen by employees. At some point, if you want open source to take over, you need it to grow and strive, and having it supported by business is a great way of getting this. The world probably cannot be run only by side projects. Not saying that all open source companies behave this well, but it's not an impossible outcome.

wavemode 3y ago

There are four business models that I believe are sustainable for open source development. 1. Solo developer (or small group), funded via e.g. Patreon 2. Non-profit funded by sponsorships and donations 3. For-profit but the software is free; the company charges for support and/or cloud services 4. Open collective, where donations fund bounties that are paid out to people who contribute patches In other words, I think the only models that can really work are models where you genuinely don't care about other companies taking your code and using it for their own purposes. (This shouldn't be surprising - that's literally the whole point of open source!) When I see companies trying something other than these four business models (usually because they desire more money than being a non-profit can offer) I inevitably see companies that might as well just not be open-source companies, because their licensing has to be restrictive for them to compete.

jraph 3y ago
Consulting on the product is another important income, possibly higher than support. It can be: - developing features or bug fixes in the open source product or an extension that are needed now by the customer - developing a custom project (not in the open, or actually sometimes in the open) on top of your open source product for the customer - supporting the customer for some integration with your open source product. You can also try to sell paid extensions (that are still open source). That would be the case for XWiki Pro apps, or many WordPress extensions. There's another way to do it, is develop your open source and sell your developer expertise for unrelated customer projects. I've worked somewhere working like this, but don't really believe it works well because you are not actually spending time in your project when you are doing this, and you are not incentivized to develop your own product when you do this. You are basically a consulting company. But you can still decide to do a bit of this. Consulting and support can work for solo developers, but that might push quite some pressure and make it difficult to disconnect depending on the way you do this.
nojvek 3y ago
There’s a 5th one. While not fully open source companies, they have a whole bundle of open source libraries and packages that don’t threaten their core business. Meta does OS well for their scale. React, Llama, PyTorch come to mind. For MS: Typescript, vscode, .net come to mind.