16 ms·

Should I open source my company? (2022)

341 points by AnhTho_FR 3y ago

kevingadd 3y ago
IMO, no. Maybe with a sufficiently restrictive license. If your core product is good enough and you permissively license it, odds are someone else with more money is just going to repackage it and sell it without throwing any money your way. On the other hand if your product isn't good enough then the decision doesn't matter since it won't take off either way. :)
- serial_dev 3y ago
  (2022)
- szundi 3y ago
  Try not to be Jeffed
  - guappa 3y ago
    AGPL?
cuuupid 3y ago
This is a really good in depth article but misses one thing so many projects miss: just sell to the civil government. USG has so many programs (eg NSF grants) for tech and the disjointedness of civil agencies, IC, and state govts means they end up procuring a dramatically large landscape of software. The regulatory and compliance bar to entry is not nearly as high as you think especially if you are teaming your first few contracts. It is solid, guaranteed revenue to fund your project for usually 3-5 year commitments, and usually massively profitable. I wish more open source companies took advantage of this, because usually fully private sector companies will end up baking open source libraries into their project and sell it at gigantic markups, pocketing everything. eg: https://x.com/ssankar/status/1749202248700420587?s=20 https://x.com/ssankar/status/1749202248700420587?s=20 When I was in govt I saw so much software that was basically open source maps + open source db for $12m. To give another frame of reference, I’ve seen OCR on PDFs carry a $2mm price tag, and a tool like weights & biases carry $30mm (all $ per annum). There are even other incentives here beyond deploying software; for example prioritizing fixing certain bugs or security flaws in your software — eg IC would have paid big $$ for safetensors. I’ll even highlight four ways Supabase could do this: - Cybercom (direct) - DOS (direct or teaming) - VA (thru a PWS) - direct to govcon software powerhouses And three ways to do this: - cold email GS 14s/15s or equivalent - hire an ex-GS15 - find a solicitation that fits on SAM.gov then use GovPro.ai (white glove) or rogue (diy) to put together a response
- huijzer 3y ago
  > just sell to the civil government. From what I've seen, governments and startups typically don't go well together. By the time the government bureaucracy has finally approved the contract, most startups would already have been out of money.
  - cuuupid 3y ago
    This is a myth that’s exaggerated by specific anecdotes around sole-source (which is where you work with the govt and they put out a notice saying they intend to go with you). Because of there not being constraints on time there and them needing to allow others to protest this makes timelines highly random. Most are not like this, usually the government puts out solicitations (RFI/Q/Ps). They have a set deadline by which they have to answer your questions, a set deadline for bids, and a set deadline (usually 30d) by which they have to select someone. You can also game this by emailing people around september, which is when they are getting ready to close their budgets. They need to spend any surplus, and I’ve seen many prominent civil agencies (won’t name and shame) throw around $1-2mm on a same-day contract with vague constraints.
    - count 3y ago
      At least in a bunch of the defense agencies, books close for new stuff mid-August. The Aug-Oct timeframe is used to finish executing already in-flight stuff. And if you miss the 10/1 deadline, you're waiting at least until Feb (for many reasons...), assuming Congress has passed a budget.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  Just started doing government research contracts. If this is in anyway similar, I'd be wary. The contracts can be lucrative, but there is just a ton of red tape where you need to have people experienced in dealing with it. It isn't for everybody and it does take a lot of time and negotiation.
  - cuuupid 3y ago
drekipus 3y ago
I've actually been thinking this a bit for one of my products. I'm thinking: I will give it a closed source grace period, then, by that time, it should either be: 1. A dud, so close the offering, show the source. 2. Working well, in which I can open-source and rely on brand recognition to carry forward the business. Releasing as AGPL3 at least means that I get some code contribution back, (right? Right?!)
- sneak 3y ago
  Free software is a gift. You shouldn’t give it expecting anything back.
  - Towaway69 3y ago
    Life is also a gift. Free software is a gift from anonymous folks. A gift from a friend can come with moral obligations - depending on your cultural background.
  - drekipus 3y ago
    Not expecting anything back, the (right? Right?) Part was a joke.
mindwok 3y ago
I love this topic, and I love Supabase. But I'd love to see a take on this from a purely business perspective, because so many companies lately have started out like this (Red Hat, Mongo, Elastic, Hashicorp, etc) and then walked it back after they became a success / went public.
- brabel 3y ago
  Supabase is just getting started... in 10 years, what do you think are the chances they'll follow the exact path of those other companies which have been around much longer? To be honest, I think that's actually the only path to a sustainable company. Start open source so you can get a good name and free contributions from the community, and then when you've got a foothold on the market, change your license so you can stop other companies from exploiting your work (and the work of your contributors) at your expense.
zurfer 3y ago
For me the main question is not, is the code good enough or will competitors copy, but how can we make enough money to build a sustainable business? The quoted and beloved open source projects are not good businesses: PostgreSQL, Python, Bitcoin, React Mongo and Elastic are great, but exceptions. There are more successful closed source database companies than open source ones. Open source companies are hard. However, they are super valuable for users.
- CaptArmchair 3y ago
  Mongo and Elastic have changed there licenses to the "service-side public license" (SSPL) which is a particular own flavor of AGPL. The OSI has stated that this isn't an open source license. [1] Barring a discussion about whether or not a license is "open source", what matters is that these businesses asserted that commonly used licenses - (A)GPL, Apache, MIT,... - are leaving ample room for competitors to setup their own managed / hosted services and compete with them through scale (e.g. Amazon's Open Search offering undercutting ElasticSearch). [1] https://blog.opensource.org/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-license/ https://blog.opensource.org/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
He writes: "But my code is bad: This is just ego. The person who spends the most time thinking about you is you, and the person who spends the most time stressing over your bad code is you as well." In most places in life this is valid, but in the developer community I disagree. Developers love talking shit about each others code. Still yearly ritual here to bash the "Clean code" book.
- guappa 3y ago
  Not true. When I happen to having to fix stuff or have to decode insane json, I curse other developers.
- flurdy 3y ago
  The article then also contradicts itself slightly with that for hiring look at their previous public contributions. However, I get their point for both cases. Looking at contributions gives a glimpse of that person. However with a grain of salt. And the imposter syndrome is strong in public contributions. I get it, and agree with the article, don't worry. I am working with a gov client at the moment so back to coding in the open again, and it is great. I am not worried that my quick one-line comment on a PR for a tiny repo is now public. Or pushed typos. It happens.
- tomashubelbauer 3y ago
  This sentence goes well with the one at the end of that paragraph: > Toxic community members who complain about bad code instead of making suggestions to improve it are not the people you want in your community anyway. If someone finds your code and goes out of their way just to shit on it, they can get fucked. I'd be handing out blocks for that.
anonzzzies 3y ago
We have been thinking about this for our product; we are definitely (and have this openly on our site) going to open source all under MIT or Apache (whatever we like by that time), but for now, but either of those, not AGPL or open-core or something like that), we find/found (not my first rodeo) it completely impossible to make money with that type of arrangement as a product (consultancy sure). Supabase had bucketloads of VC money, as do almost all 'big' open source projects. If you are bootstrapped, this is not going to pay the bills for quite a while especially on an ambitious / hard project. People only can work for free for so long and with closed code, a small team in constant contact etc you can move a lot faster by cutting the overhead needed for a successful OSS project. It would be interesting to hear a story like this from a project of similar size that has $0 funding, has been founded in the last 5 years, has a fulltime team >1 and exists for 3+ years and still would recommend this approach. How are they making ends meet? Things like Redis simply don't happen anymore. At least; I haven't seen any. Hell, even trivial projects, like langchain, get in 10s of millions of VC and those would be my candidates for actually being able to do it as a few-man-band while getting in money via different sources.
- sneak 3y ago
  One can release all code under free software licenses without being or trying to be “a successful OSS project” and its associated overhead. All of my software is released as public domain (free software) and none of it is a successful open source project or community. Free software is first and foremost an ideology, and a practice or feature second.
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    Absolutely agree and I do with my own code, but I need to eat and haven't managed to do that from open source. So yeah, that's why we pledge to open in a set time or set revenue stream, but I am not rich enough to just work for nothing in the meanwhile. That doesn't mean that I don't open most things I do in private. Edit: forgot 'don't'
- myaccountonhn 3y ago
  Sourcehut is AGPL, maybe not as used as something like Redis but has managed to employ >1, is profitable (according to last report 2022) and has been around for 3+ years.
imiric 3y ago
One aspect I don't see mentioned is that it's not just about open sourcing your codebase. Many companies make the mistake of using open source as a marketing tool to attract users, and as a funnel into their commercial plans. They prioritize working on what makes them money, instead of being good maintainers of their open source product. They don't know how to build and nurture their open source community, and treat open source users as second-class compared to their commercial users. Don't do this. The OSS product needs to be as featureful as your commercial product. It's fine to offer some commercial value added features and services that would only be useful for enterprise customers, but these shouldn't be core features of the product. You can have priority support for your paying customers, but don't leave OSS users with "community support" only. At the end of the day, the company does need to make money to survive, but treat all your users with the same respect. If the product is good enough and solves a genuine problem, you won't have difficulties monetizing.
- _cenw 3y ago
  You can go for adoption / mindshare and consulting, or you can go for selling the product. There's very little in between when even the largest expected adopters can only derive little convenience from paying you. "If the product is good enough and solves a genuine problem, you won't have difficulties monetizing." is wishful thinking. Look at Elastic, MongoDB, RHEL and HashiCorp - all with amazing adoption - having trouble attracting paying customers to pay them over someone else and subsequently having to remove the ability of others to monetize their product.
  - imiric 3y ago
    > Look at Elastic, MongoDB, RHEL and HashiCorp - all with amazing adoption - having trouble attracting paying customers to pay them over someone else and subsequently having to remove the ability of others to monetize their product. Those are still service problems. If you as the author of the project can't build a solid moat around it that entices users to use your commercial service over someone else's, that means you haven't done a good job at it, and others have. It's a difficult balance to keep OSS users happy, while also making the best commercial offering. Not many companies do this right. I think Grafana has done a solid job of monetizing the open core model. I struggle to think of others, but I'm sure they exist. EDIT: Another example might be Automattic. I'm not a WordPress user, but AFAIK it has a very healthy open source community, and wordpress.com is _the_ place to use it commercially. Doesn't WP run something like half of all web sites?
android521 3y ago
The business model of supabase is to market themselves as an open source company but in practice, no one in their right mind will try to self host for production. (you know, some subtle missing documentation or some subtle bugs or some subtle missing important features). So they get the praise for being open source but in fact, it is never practical. It is just marketing scheme.
- XCSme 3y ago
  I think this is the case with most open-source projects that have both a cloud and self-hosted opening, they provide a much better experience for their hosted solution and don't spend a lot of effort into making their self-hosted version as usable as it could be.
- rizky05 3y ago
  [dead]
- yadascript 3y ago
  I don't agree this is just a marketing scheme but in any case it's still a much better situation for consumers than companies with closed-source products.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- portaouflop 3y ago
  I know people who are running Supbase in production for Enterprise customers so that claim is just false.
- k__ 3y ago
  Open source isn't just about self hosting. It also allows developers to look at the code that's actually running, even if they don't run it themselves.
  - sesm 3y ago
clbrmbr 3y ago
Any thoughts on (F)OSS models for IoT? We’ve usually got some hardware and firmware closely bound together, with traditional model being selling hardware with proprietary firmware. Any examples?
- Towaway69 3y ago
  What FlowFuse[0] does is market Node-RED[1] as the Open Source offering, obtaining contributions for various devices from the community and incorporate those into their commerical offering. IoT has the problem that many devices but few users per device. So who is going to make the effect to build an integration for third-party software? The FlowFuse model is to allow the community to do that while they (indirectly) upsell that work. FlowFuse also provides the SaaS solution for commerical gains. [0] https://flowfuse.com/ https://flowfuse.com/ [1] https://nodered.org https://nodered.org
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dingi 3y ago
Yeah yeah. Haven't we already seen this going on again and again. Companies love OSS until they get some amount of traction in the market. And they'll jump ship to being a proprietary vendor right away after that. Can't believe people fall for this shit all the time.
- palata 3y ago
  Companies exist for profit. If open sourcing helps them getting to a point where they will make more profit, they will open source. If later going proprietary helps them make more profit, they will, too. Still what they released as open source stays open source, so it's still a win. Also if contributors don't sign a CLA, then it makes it harder for the company to go proprietary. To me that's the only thing: contributors should not sign a CLA: either contributors keep their copyright, or they should not contribute for free.
- szundi 3y ago
  Being opensource helps finding bugs in something you rely on if it does not go away fast enough. Sometimes I had success with this, although not ideal, one more option. Even if for profit and all
hoc 3y ago
From a Firebase perspective they might think that they never should have documented their concepts and APIs in the first place... :) So a bit of the right words to the matching user base and with good points. Just that you always need to draw your own conclusion from your unique position. Kudos for the the nicely adapted Jurassic Park scene.
opengears 3y ago
No
Beefin 3y ago
i think the biggest moat OSS companies have is production-grade infrastructure hosting.
gadders 3y ago
>>When we discuss open source business models with other founders, there are three complaints that come up again and again. These are: - People might criticize my messy/bad/unfinished code - Hackers will find and exploit security holes - Competitors will steal my Intellectual Property I think they are missing a 4th item which is "Amazon/AWS will commercialise and sell a service based on my code and not pay me anything."
- flurdy 3y ago
  That is covered further down in the "Late stage" paragraph. Basically, you are already winning if the big ones try to emulate you, though some advanced planning to mitigate this is needed. But it should not be the focus nor worry at the start, if I interpret the article correctly.
  - gadders 3y ago
    I would suggest (and I've run zero companies and I'm just going by what I read on here) that if you want to open source your project, from the start pick a license so that big cloud companies can't commercialise your product for free. People seem to get really salty when companies change their license further down the line to prevent this.
    - sneak 3y ago
      Those licenses aren’t open source. People get salty because those license changes are from open source to source available (like the BSL). Some of us (myself included) even consider licenses like the AGPL to be nonfree. Free software can be used for any purpose, including competing with the original authors. If you can’t do whatever you want with the software, it’s not free software. If you want to open source your software but you want to put restrictions on what people can do with it, then, well, you don’t want to open source your software (and IMO the free software community would be better off without your free software cosplay).
      - segfaltnh 3y ago
hobofan 3y ago
> If after 6 years, Google tries to steal your lunch, you should have a brand, a team, and a community, that have spent the last few years preparing for a David versus Goliath-type fight. From my experience, for procurement people all of that (brand, community, team, DX) will matter close to 0 in comparison to compliance, etc, if you are going head-to-head with an existing supplier like Google.
- awalias 3y ago
  Great point! I should probably add that to the article. In our case (Supabase) we have indeed spent the last few years working on compliance (SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR etc.) in order to meet these requirements so your comment here is on point.
brap 3y ago
The list of main complaints against OSS they present here is (conveniently?) missing the biggest one, in my opinion: Your users can just host their own version instead of paying you. It seems like many OSS companies mitigate this by leaving out features from the OSS version or making the deployment more difficult than it should be. I’m not complaining, I think it’s fair, but this is the reality. It’s funny how they don’t address this one, but instead they list “oh no my code isn’t pretty” as a valid complaint against going OSS. Who cares.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- imiric 3y ago
  This depends on the product. Sometimes self-hosting is not just a matter of starting some Docker containers, but takes work and resources to scale and maintain properly. It might not even be a matter of the OSS version lacking features, but about the nature of the product itself. For example, you can self-host WordPress if you want, and it's a perfectly capable product. But if you want to outsource the complexities around it, scale it easily, properly secure it, etc., it's worth considering using wordpress.com instead.
  - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
    Isn't that a reflection of how bad WordPress is? That they haven't prioritised security and ease of use in the development of the product. This model definitely leads to some perverse incentives.
    - imiric 3y ago
      No, there are maintenance issues with hosting WordPress that go beyond just the product. You need a domain and TLS cert, storage, bandwidth, a curated list of plugins, and an easy way to scale it all. None of this is core to WordPress itself. I'm not a WP user, but see all the features on https://wordpress.com/features/ https://wordpress.com/features/. Grafana and its ecosystem of apps are another example. Sure, you technically could host and maintain it yourself, but Grafana Cloud streamlines all of that, which is worth paying for. This doesn't mean that Grafana products are intentionally limited, but that the commercial product offers value added features some users are willing to pay for. The fact that some companies take advantage of this model doesn't mean that the model itself doesn't work. They're just not good companies to begin with, and don't understand open source.
water9 3y ago
No unless you like, giving away the goose that lays the golden egg. How successful would Coca-Cola be today if they open sourced their company?
- sneak 3y ago
  The recipe for Coca-Cola is publicly available and is not legally protected or exclusive in any way. Many people make extremely similar cola beverages. Their business value is in brand and marketing, not any exclusive method of producing the product. You have inadvertently chosen a perfect example of why free software is better than proprietary software.
  - water9 3y ago
    It’s called a trade secret it is not publicly open. It’s one of the best kept secrets of all time. What the hell are you talking about?
    - sneak 3y ago
      This is urban legend, just like the KFC “herbs and spices”. GC/MS is a thing. The recipe for Coke is literally published on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_formula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_formula The specifics of the Teller-Ulam design is one of the best kept secrets of all time. It’s impossible to keep secret the list of ingredients in a thing you literally provide for sale to any member of the general public. Don’t eat the pasta.
      - water9 3y ago
        There are three different versions of the recipe on the Wikipedia page… Obviously, Pepsi has gotten close, but there’s a reason Pepsi doesn’t taste like Coca-Cola, and a reason I buy Coca-Cola over Pepsi
sylware 3y ago
open source is not enough anymore... humanity needs "lean open source"... and stable in time.
throwaway63467 3y ago
I mean Supabase was initially a glue layer on top of existing open-source tools, not sure if they could’ve kept it closed source even if they wanted (though I guess most of the licenses of the stuff they used would allow it).
- awalias 3y ago
  This is true! Supabase db after all is "just" Postgres. In fact it's one of our product principles to adopt existing open source projects before writing our own. You're also correct on the second bit, everything in the stack is MIT, apache2, postgres licensed so it would have been ok to run a closed fork if we'd have been that way inclined.
jWhick 3y ago
The author is clearly a utopist, advertising and trying to promote his own oss views. However, while oss has its growing niche it's clear that it isn't for everyone. The thing to ask yourself before going oss path is what are you gaining by going oss and what are you trading for that gain. For supabase it's clearly beneficial to be oss, they are a niche database, and by going oss they can benefit a lot from integrations, not to mention they are basically ripping off the evil firebase. So by going oss they are perceived as heroes. On top of that who would use another closed firebase that isn't from google? They can't compete on pricing, nor the scale. I think supabase were even advertised as open source firbase at some point. However if you are not ripping off some popular commercial tool and making it open source, and making open source as your main differentiator, in that case there is very little to gain by going oss. You might as well get most of authors advertised "oss benefits" by just having great developer experience and docs, while giving very little in return.
satvikpendem 3y ago
Open sourcing your company doesn't make sense, in my view, unless you're targeting developers or you're building a product that no one would realistically self host anyway, with Supabase being a prime example of both. For just the latter, Plausible Analytics is one, where one could self host (I in fact do, via Coolify.io) but you'd lose out on updates unless you build your own CI/CD system to pull and merge updates from their releases.
gdcbe 3y ago
I understand you can give 1000's of reasons why it's fine. But it's still IMHO a sad reality that a giant cooperation cannot play it fair by being a corporate sponsor of the open source projects that they more or less wish to directly use as a service... I get that legally this is fine but ... Common... adapting FOSS for your own use cases in your basement or little company is still very different then a giant cooperation outcompeting you before you ever had a change... There might be room for a license to make FOSS software more like BSL if used by a company above a certain revenue threshold or w/e... Perhaps legally that's impossible, otherwise I have no idea why such a template does not exist yet.
snowstormsun 3y ago
I think many companies probably don't like to be open source because - they like the idea of "security through obscurity". Open source means more work patching found vulnerabilities, so they rather not publish their code and instead tick check-lists for compliance and do blackbox pentests which makes them look secure. - like to do marketing that exaggerates the innovation of their product. That's difficult to do if everyone can see the code.
nevodavid 3y ago
If you are interested in learning about open-source marketing, check: https://gitroom.com/blog https://gitroom.com/blog
jimjag 3y ago
Open Source is not a business model. Open Source is a licensing and development model.
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  >Open Source is a licensing and development model. With traits of a religion.
  - dboreham 3y ago
    All of software development has those traits. Arguably everything humans do is like that.
gumby 3y ago
In this case the ends drive the means. "Should I open source my company" is a decision like "should we write our code in C++?" Without starting a flame war there are good and bad reasons to choose an implementation language and they should be driven by your business needs, whatever they are. The same is true for how you plan to license your code and what business model you build around it.
martypitt 3y ago
I love Supabase, commercial open source in general, and agree with lots of this post. However this comment feels off: > In software ideas are cheap. Value is almost always created in execution of ideas. I've heard this phrase around things like "I have this cool idea for a startup - will you sign my NDA before I tell you about it?" However, when you're open sourcing your software, you're not just providing an idea, but a significant portion of execution of that idea too. Sure, code isn't the full execution - that expands to sales / marketing / support / etc. However, the article is a little glib towards the value of the code, suggesting it's worthless without sales / marketing /etc. I don't think that's true.
- codegeek 3y ago
  "suggesting it's worthless without sales / marketing /etc. I don't think that's true." Code is not worthless but it almost is without sales/marketing/talking to customers. If I could split the value, it would be 90% sales/marketing/customer validation and 10% code. I run a low 7 figure bootstrapped SAAS (not open source) and I can tell you that code is mostly shit anyway and keeps evolving.
- Towaway69 3y ago
  I think code is worthless once it has been created. This is because the cost of copying is zero. You can't copy a house for zero but software yes. The process of creating the code and solving all those little unseen problems is for what developers are paid. Hence selling software is so profitable. If you don't sell software, you won't make money with it. Software is not like a physical object in a our shared reality.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
> Once your project reaches significant scale, you might find yourself in a situation like Elastic, or Mongo, where large cloud providers are offering your product with a superior distribution model. > Secondly, and more constructively, you should prepare for this eventuality by finding areas where you can outcompete anyone. Most cloud providers are notoriously bad at Developer Experience for example, so take advantage of that and make DX one of your core competencies. If after 6 years, Google tries to steal your lunch, you should have a brand, a team, and a community, that have spent the last few years preparing for a David versus Goliath-type fight. Make sure you're not blindsided by something like this by planning for it from the beginning. You have enough time and focus on your side to construct a winning strategy. Consider Google Firebase, which runs on Google Cloud and can access services from Google Cloud[1], but has a separate frontend, focused on DX rather then features, and imagine Amazon Supabase. [1]: https://firebase.google.com/firebase-and-gcp https://firebase.google.com/firebase-and-gcp
lmeyerov 3y ago
There is some tricky big assumption being made here around sustainable profitability that misses our lived reality, especially given challenges like US developer salaries. Paraphrasing, OSS companies need lightning to hit twice, first for the OSS and then again for the company. In our case, the Graphistry team loves and breathes OSS every day. We helped start what became the massively popular Apache Arrow and Nvidia RAPIDS projects, release our Python & JS clients as OSS, and PyGraphistry[AI] is a graph Swiss army knife, including tools like GFQL the only embeddable & dataframe-native & GPU-accelerated implementation of the Cypher graph query language.. ... But we sustainably grow primarily by selling cloud/on-prem self-hosting licenses to enterprises, govs, and data companies to our GPU graph viz server. Thankfully, after years of grinding, that business is growing well. As a natural experiment, our alternate SaaS hosting revenue does support a tiny team... but not the majority of our team. Most of our innovation cycles would disappear without our self-hosting license revenue. There's some cross of winning lottery ticket, SaaS market profile, and technical defensibility getting missed in the article that I can't put my finger on. Our launches of Louie.AI + GFQL are changing the OSS viability story in our particular case (I'd love to chat w successful founders here!), so I'm not saying it can't work, but our experience to get to this point makes me worried for new founders reading the article.
- dcow 3y ago
  Are the companies that buy your on prem solution buying the source code or the support? In other words if you said to them “hey the source is open now” would they say “oh cool we’ll be canceling our contract”?
  - lmeyerov 3y ago
    Fair question! A good chunk would cancel, and at a minimum, switching to free sw / paid support would drop our product-related revenue by ~70-80%. Then again, we could make the software worse to trigger higher support hours, as complained by others in the thread about some OSS companies. Or really lean into it, going to full-blown consulting. However, switching to a consulting business has all sorts of negative externalities that can easily destroy the strengths and joys of a product culture. We actually do provide a growing side of professional services and roadmap acceleration for Graphistry & louie.ai (graph viz, graph AI, genAI, for data-intensive operational / investigative scenarios). By having our product licensing revenue the majority, we get to make sure there is stronger positive mutual alignment between us and our users, and our software and their long-term mission. As another natural experiment, I was interviewing someone from a company in the same space a few days ago that doesn't have this discipline. While our company is younger, our tech roadmap has been literally years ahead every year, and the software they deliver has no real upgrade path.. alignment helps when you care about your craft and customers. (And for HN'ers, it's a 5X+ on valuation multiple.)
wiradikusuma 3y ago
Are there many success stories for open source targeted at end-users? E.g. imagine if Photoshop is open source, would Adobe be financially successful?
- dboreham 3y ago
  No?
- stehardcover 3y ago
  Blender?
dudeinjapan 3y ago
Pro tip: Name your company "Open___" then don't open source it.
didgetmaster 3y ago
I feel like the third point (competitors) is a major concern that was just brushed aside. The 'just out-innovate them' approach might work if your startup is well funded with a very capable and nimble development team. But what if you are a fledgling startup with very limited resources. You have a very small team that struggles to do a fraction of the features on your 'TO DO' list. You don't have millions of VC dollars that enables your team to keep the wolves at bay. It wouldn't even take a tech giant like FAANG to outdo your project after forking your source. A medium-sized company could throw a dozen programmers on the project and their fork would surge ahead of the original with respect to features, support, and distribution. They could out-market you as well.
- cuu508 3y ago
  It would be interesting to see examples where this scenario played out.
lamontcg 3y ago
Probably not. Release your code publicly so people can read and contribute. Require paid licenses for commercial use over X numbers of seats where X is pretty generous and keep it free at the lowest tier. Those are hard things to claw back later without people completely losing their shit. Then the really hard part is to instill a culture inside your business that they paying customers are funding all the development and don't just obsess about the enterprise use case at the expense of all else. Keep showing the free tier people that you're listening to them. And that's what you'll fail at.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Does it provide more value for your business than it distracts from your business? That's a difficult calculation. Personally, I love open source, but I wouldn't open source a business unless I needed to.
dcow 3y ago
On the topic of open sourcing your core business, founders often worry that a competitor is going to take their source code, fork it, and directly compete with them. But, is there an actual example of this happening for real and the fork winning out and killing the incumbent in the market? I mean there’s a fork of Signal that doesn’t require a phone number (which is Signal’s heinous transgression if you poll HN) and we’re all still using Signal. And all you have to do to prevent bigcorp taking your stuff is slap the [A]GPL on it for “free users” (while still allowing others to purchase the source code under a more permissive license should they require it).
chandmkhn 3y ago
`And not one of them were ever required to solve a LeetCode problem over Zoom.` I can see some motivated developers benefit from this. But now those devs are working on someone's "open sourced" company for free thus growing someone's company in exchange for employability elsewhere. I can't shake of the feeling of borderline exploitation when I see the phrases 'my company" and "open source" next to each other.
dboreham 3y ago
OSS is a thing you buy, not a thing you sell.
seanwilson 3y ago
What about for desktop apps? Are there good examples of this? Unless you can offer some cloud/online/support service to go with it, there'd be no reason for most to pay?
freeopinion 3y ago
I think the question is meant to mean "Should my company open the source of its software?" But for me, answering the question as asked provides the path to answering the question as reworded. To me, the question as asked is about the nature of the software the company uses, not sells. I personally will always choose an open source product over the alternative, even if I happily pay for support or just donate to support the project. Unfettered access to the source is fundamental to me, even for software I never intend to alter. I know this seems to many like an extremist position. But I don't like the idea that I am not allowed to tear down my microwave or doorknob or transmission. I might never be able to put them back together in working order. Or I might be able to find a gear with a missing tooth and execute a $2 repair instead of a $90 replacement. Or I might invent a new frakenstein microwave with a tranmission. Extending the featureset of a web server or understanding why my plugin is crashing the host app, etc. are important to me. I think they are important to society. So I hold on to my open source extremism. If you show me the hottest new tiny web server that can do HTTPS/4 with built-in AI in just 5Kb, I will be intrigued, but if it isn't open source, I'll stick with my current stack. With this mindset, the software I produce is open source. And sometimes people pay me for it.
lgkk 3y ago
Really like the pointer to the well known security. First time I actually saw anyone mention it on something popular.
astro- 3y ago
I'd say that open-source works best for companies when they don't open the main thing. Meta building React in the open is a good example. The community gets a well-maintained library. Meta gets free testing, code contributions and potential hiring pipeline. When trying to compete with Meta, React gives you virtually no advantage. There's no incentive to leave important features out of the public codebase. Both Meta and the community benefit. Would it make sense for Meta to open the codebase for facebook.com? Aside from studying/scrutinising the code, the only other thing you'd be able to do with it is to change the logo and try to compete with Facebook. In this example, it's still probably not enough to disrupt them thanks to the social graph and infrastructure complexity. But you could imagine moments where even Meta gets nervous when anyone can start competing with feature parity from day one. Over the long-term, it's more likely that Meta would want to keep some features private. It's also less likely that they would get lots of quality contributions back. If you're running a fb.com clone in production, you're likely trying to compete with them on some level. This leads to a weird relationship with the community and limited value for both sides.
thomastjeffery 3y ago
I think the distinguishing question is, "Is the company's software a tool used to fulfill the company's goals, or is the software itself the goal of the company?" If your answer is the latter, then you have more problems in store than open-source viability. You aren't genuinely testing/dogfooding your product. Your product goals will trend away from real customer value and toward implementation convenience, self-compatibility, 3rd-party incompatibility, and a closed-minded product vision. The only way to keep this business model viable is to monopolize your market. But will it be you monopolizing, or will it be FAANG?
glitchc 3y ago
Well, Microsoft invented the "sale of proprietary software as a license to end-users" model. Red Hat, on the other hand, offers value-added services on top of open-source software. It's easy to compare their relative market valuations.
jdwyah 3y ago
Just kicked off a project to explore open-sourcing what we've built (VC funded). I'm considering a different tack which I think may be interesting. We have a lot of client libraries, already open sourced. Then we have the hosted APIs and DB which are not open. Making all the close-source stuff open, feels like a big effort, with an unclear reward and more likely that we just end up with a hard to install OS project, since it feels like the hosting expertise _is_ part of the core value prop. What I'm excited about though is whether we could take the hosted piece out of the equation and find something that is pretty different, but has its own niche. For us this would be replacing the web UI and DB hosting of the paid product, with a CLI and simpler git based hosting for an open source version. ie If you want hosted feature flags, we think you should use the hosted thing, but if you want gitops style feature flags (100% reliable), then use the OS version. I like the idea that we could really focus on making the open version great in its niche, but have a super clear line about what is paid / hosted, to help us avoid the complexity of always needing to decide how to nerf the OS version.
brylie 3y ago
We are building some educational video games and considering starting a company to help sustain the effort. If possible, it would be great to publish the source code and game assets as free/open software and free cultural works. However, I’m not sure about a business model to fund continuous research and development. Is anyone here working on or aware of any open source game studios with sustainable funding/revenue? Any other advice or consideration about licensing and business models? Thanks in advance :-)
fuddle 3y ago
I'm not sure if an MIT license is sustainable long term. I see most open source companies adapt AGPL, open core or source available licenses.
wseqyrku 3y ago
This seems to work fine for Temporalio.

341 points by AnhTho_FR 3y ago

IMO, no. Maybe with a sufficiently restrictive license. If your core product is good enough and you permissively license it, odds are someone else with more money is just going to repackage it and sell it without throwing any money your way. On the other hand if your product isn't good enough then the decision doesn't matter since it won't take off either way. :)

serial_dev 3y ago
(2022)
szundi 3y ago
Try not to be Jeffed
- guappa 3y ago
  AGPL?

cuuupid 3y ago

This is a really good in depth article but misses one thing so many projects miss: just sell to the civil government. USG has so many programs (eg NSF grants) for tech and the disjointedness of civil agencies, IC, and state govts means they end up procuring a dramatically large landscape of software. The regulatory and compliance bar to entry is not nearly as high as you think especially if you are teaming your first few contracts. It is solid, guaranteed revenue to fund your project for usually 3-5 year commitments, and usually massively profitable. I wish more open source companies took advantage of this, because usually fully private sector companies will end up baking open source libraries into their project and sell it at gigantic markups, pocketing everything. eg: https://x.com/ssankar/status/1749202248700420587?s=20 https://x.com/ssankar/status/1749202248700420587?s=20 When I was in govt I saw so much software that was basically open source maps + open source db for $12m. To give another frame of reference, I’ve seen OCR on PDFs carry a $2mm price tag, and a tool like weights & biases carry $30mm (all $ per annum). There are even other incentives here beyond deploying software; for example prioritizing fixing certain bugs or security flaws in your software — eg IC would have paid big $$ for safetensors. I’ll even highlight four ways Supabase could do this: - Cybercom (direct) - DOS (direct or teaming) - VA (thru a PWS) - direct to govcon software powerhouses And three ways to do this: - cold email GS 14s/15s or equivalent - hire an ex-GS15 - find a solicitation that fits on SAM.gov then use GovPro.ai (white glove) or rogue (diy) to put together a response

huijzer 3y ago
> just sell to the civil government. From what I've seen, governments and startups typically don't go well together. By the time the government bureaucracy has finally approved the contract, most startups would already have been out of money.
- cuuupid 3y ago
  This is a myth that’s exaggerated by specific anecdotes around sole-source (which is where you work with the govt and they put out a notice saying they intend to go with you). Because of there not being constraints on time there and them needing to allow others to protest this makes timelines highly random. Most are not like this, usually the government puts out solicitations (RFI/Q/Ps). They have a set deadline by which they have to answer your questions, a set deadline for bids, and a set deadline (usually 30d) by which they have to select someone. You can also game this by emailing people around september, which is when they are getting ready to close their budgets. They need to spend any surplus, and I’ve seen many prominent civil agencies (won’t name and shame) throw around $1-2mm on a same-day contract with vague constraints.
  - count 3y ago
    At least in a bunch of the defense agencies, books close for new stuff mid-August. The Aug-Oct timeframe is used to finish executing already in-flight stuff. And if you miss the 10/1 deadline, you're waiting at least until Feb (for many reasons...), assuming Congress has passed a budget.
7thaccount 3y ago
Just started doing government research contracts. If this is in anyway similar, I'd be wary. The contracts can be lucrative, but there is just a ton of red tape where you need to have people experienced in dealing with it. It isn't for everybody and it does take a lot of time and negotiation.
- cuuupid 3y ago

drekipus 3y ago

I've actually been thinking this a bit for one of my products. I'm thinking: I will give it a closed source grace period, then, by that time, it should either be: 1. A dud, so close the offering, show the source. 2. Working well, in which I can open-source and rely on brand recognition to carry forward the business. Releasing as AGPL3 at least means that I get some code contribution back, (right? Right?!)

sneak 3y ago
Free software is a gift. You shouldn’t give it expecting anything back.
- Towaway69 3y ago
  Life is also a gift. Free software is a gift from anonymous folks. A gift from a friend can come with moral obligations - depending on your cultural background.
- drekipus 3y ago
  Not expecting anything back, the (right? Right?) Part was a joke.

mindwok 3y ago

I love this topic, and I love Supabase. But I'd love to see a take on this from a purely business perspective, because so many companies lately have started out like this (Red Hat, Mongo, Elastic, Hashicorp, etc) and then walked it back after they became a success / went public.

brabel 3y ago
Supabase is just getting started... in 10 years, what do you think are the chances they'll follow the exact path of those other companies which have been around much longer? To be honest, I think that's actually the only path to a sustainable company. Start open source so you can get a good name and free contributions from the community, and then when you've got a foothold on the market, change your license so you can stop other companies from exploiting your work (and the work of your contributors) at your expense.

zurfer 3y ago

For me the main question is not, is the code good enough or will competitors copy, but how can we make enough money to build a sustainable business? The quoted and beloved open source projects are not good businesses: PostgreSQL, Python, Bitcoin, React Mongo and Elastic are great, but exceptions. There are more successful closed source database companies than open source ones. Open source companies are hard. However, they are super valuable for users.

CaptArmchair 3y ago
Mongo and Elastic have changed there licenses to the "service-side public license" (SSPL) which is a particular own flavor of AGPL. The OSI has stated that this isn't an open source license. [1] Barring a discussion about whether or not a license is "open source", what matters is that these businesses asserted that commonly used licenses - (A)GPL, Apache, MIT,... - are leaving ample room for competitors to setup their own managed / hosted services and compete with them through scale (e.g. Amazon's Open Search offering undercutting ElasticSearch). [1] https://blog.opensource.org/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-license/ https://blog.opensource.org/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

He writes: "But my code is bad: This is just ego. The person who spends the most time thinking about you is you, and the person who spends the most time stressing over your bad code is you as well." In most places in life this is valid, but in the developer community I disagree. Developers love talking shit about each others code. Still yearly ritual here to bash the "Clean code" book.

guappa 3y ago
Not true. When I happen to having to fix stuff or have to decode insane json, I curse other developers.
flurdy 3y ago
The article then also contradicts itself slightly with that for hiring look at their previous public contributions. However, I get their point for both cases. Looking at contributions gives a glimpse of that person. However with a grain of salt. And the imposter syndrome is strong in public contributions. I get it, and agree with the article, don't worry. I am working with a gov client at the moment so back to coding in the open again, and it is great. I am not worried that my quick one-line comment on a PR for a tiny repo is now public. Or pushed typos. It happens.
tomashubelbauer 3y ago
This sentence goes well with the one at the end of that paragraph: > Toxic community members who complain about bad code instead of making suggestions to improve it are not the people you want in your community anyway. If someone finds your code and goes out of their way just to shit on it, they can get fucked. I'd be handing out blocks for that.

anonzzzies 3y ago

We have been thinking about this for our product; we are definitely (and have this openly on our site) going to open source all under MIT or Apache (whatever we like by that time), but for now, but either of those, not AGPL or open-core or something like that), we find/found (not my first rodeo) it completely impossible to make money with that type of arrangement as a product (consultancy sure). Supabase had bucketloads of VC money, as do almost all 'big' open source projects. If you are bootstrapped, this is not going to pay the bills for quite a while especially on an ambitious / hard project. People only can work for free for so long and with closed code, a small team in constant contact etc you can move a lot faster by cutting the overhead needed for a successful OSS project. It would be interesting to hear a story like this from a project of similar size that has $0 funding, has been founded in the last 5 years, has a fulltime team >1 and exists for 3+ years and still would recommend this approach. How are they making ends meet? Things like Redis simply don't happen anymore. At least; I haven't seen any. Hell, even trivial projects, like langchain, get in 10s of millions of VC and those would be my candidates for actually being able to do it as a few-man-band while getting in money via different sources.

sneak 3y ago
One can release all code under free software licenses without being or trying to be “a successful OSS project” and its associated overhead. All of my software is released as public domain (free software) and none of it is a successful open source project or community. Free software is first and foremost an ideology, and a practice or feature second.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  Absolutely agree and I do with my own code, but I need to eat and haven't managed to do that from open source. So yeah, that's why we pledge to open in a set time or set revenue stream, but I am not rich enough to just work for nothing in the meanwhile. That doesn't mean that I don't open most things I do in private. Edit: forgot 'don't'
myaccountonhn 3y ago
Sourcehut is AGPL, maybe not as used as something like Redis but has managed to employ >1, is profitable (according to last report 2022) and has been around for 3+ years.

imiric 3y ago

One aspect I don't see mentioned is that it's not just about open sourcing your codebase. Many companies make the mistake of using open source as a marketing tool to attract users, and as a funnel into their commercial plans. They prioritize working on what makes them money, instead of being good maintainers of their open source product. They don't know how to build and nurture their open source community, and treat open source users as second-class compared to their commercial users. Don't do this. The OSS product needs to be as featureful as your commercial product. It's fine to offer some commercial value added features and services that would only be useful for enterprise customers, but these shouldn't be core features of the product. You can have priority support for your paying customers, but don't leave OSS users with "community support" only. At the end of the day, the company does need to make money to survive, but treat all your users with the same respect. If the product is good enough and solves a genuine problem, you won't have difficulties monetizing.

_cenw 3y ago
You can go for adoption / mindshare and consulting, or you can go for selling the product. There's very little in between when even the largest expected adopters can only derive little convenience from paying you. "If the product is good enough and solves a genuine problem, you won't have difficulties monetizing." is wishful thinking. Look at Elastic, MongoDB, RHEL and HashiCorp - all with amazing adoption - having trouble attracting paying customers to pay them over someone else and subsequently having to remove the ability of others to monetize their product.
- imiric 3y ago
  > Look at Elastic, MongoDB, RHEL and HashiCorp - all with amazing adoption - having trouble attracting paying customers to pay them over someone else and subsequently having to remove the ability of others to monetize their product. Those are still service problems. If you as the author of the project can't build a solid moat around it that entices users to use your commercial service over someone else's, that means you haven't done a good job at it, and others have. It's a difficult balance to keep OSS users happy, while also making the best commercial offering. Not many companies do this right. I think Grafana has done a solid job of monetizing the open core model. I struggle to think of others, but I'm sure they exist. EDIT: Another example might be Automattic. I'm not a WordPress user, but AFAIK it has a very healthy open source community, and wordpress.com is _the_ place to use it commercially. Doesn't WP run something like half of all web sites?

android521 3y ago

The business model of supabase is to market themselves as an open source company but in practice, no one in their right mind will try to self host for production. (you know, some subtle missing documentation or some subtle bugs or some subtle missing important features). So they get the praise for being open source but in fact, it is never practical. It is just marketing scheme.

XCSme 3y ago
I think this is the case with most open-source projects that have both a cloud and self-hosted opening, they provide a much better experience for their hosted solution and don't spend a lot of effort into making their self-hosted version as usable as it could be.
rizky05 3y ago
[dead]
yadascript 3y ago
I don't agree this is just a marketing scheme but in any case it's still a much better situation for consumers than companies with closed-source products.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
portaouflop 3y ago
I know people who are running Supbase in production for Enterprise customers so that claim is just false.
k__ 3y ago
Open source isn't just about self hosting. It also allows developers to look at the code that's actually running, even if they don't run it themselves.
- sesm 3y ago

clbrmbr 3y ago

Any thoughts on (F)OSS models for IoT? We’ve usually got some hardware and firmware closely bound together, with traditional model being selling hardware with proprietary firmware. Any examples?

Towaway69 3y ago
What FlowFuse[0] does is market Node-RED[1] as the Open Source offering, obtaining contributions for various devices from the community and incorporate those into their commerical offering. IoT has the problem that many devices but few users per device. So who is going to make the effect to build an integration for third-party software? The FlowFuse model is to allow the community to do that while they (indirectly) upsell that work. FlowFuse also provides the SaaS solution for commerical gains. [0] https://flowfuse.com/ https://flowfuse.com/ [1] https://nodered.org https://nodered.org

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dingi 3y ago

Yeah yeah. Haven't we already seen this going on again and again. Companies love OSS until they get some amount of traction in the market. And they'll jump ship to being a proprietary vendor right away after that. Can't believe people fall for this shit all the time.

palata 3y ago
Companies exist for profit. If open sourcing helps them getting to a point where they will make more profit, they will open source. If later going proprietary helps them make more profit, they will, too. Still what they released as open source stays open source, so it's still a win. Also if contributors don't sign a CLA, then it makes it harder for the company to go proprietary. To me that's the only thing: contributors should not sign a CLA: either contributors keep their copyright, or they should not contribute for free.
szundi 3y ago
Being opensource helps finding bugs in something you rely on if it does not go away fast enough. Sometimes I had success with this, although not ideal, one more option. Even if for profit and all

hoc 3y ago

From a Firebase perspective they might think that they never should have documented their concepts and APIs in the first place... :) So a bit of the right words to the matching user base and with good points. Just that you always need to draw your own conclusion from your unique position. Kudos for the the nicely adapted Jurassic Park scene.

opengears 3y ago

Beefin 3y ago

i think the biggest moat OSS companies have is production-grade infrastructure hosting.

gadders 3y ago

>>When we discuss open source business models with other founders, there are three complaints that come up again and again. These are: - People might criticize my messy/bad/unfinished code - Hackers will find and exploit security holes - Competitors will steal my Intellectual Property I think they are missing a 4th item which is "Amazon/AWS will commercialise and sell a service based on my code and not pay me anything."

flurdy 3y ago
That is covered further down in the "Late stage" paragraph. Basically, you are already winning if the big ones try to emulate you, though some advanced planning to mitigate this is needed. But it should not be the focus nor worry at the start, if I interpret the article correctly.
- gadders 3y ago
  I would suggest (and I've run zero companies and I'm just going by what I read on here) that if you want to open source your project, from the start pick a license so that big cloud companies can't commercialise your product for free. People seem to get really salty when companies change their license further down the line to prevent this.
  - sneak 3y ago
    Those licenses aren’t open source. People get salty because those license changes are from open source to source available (like the BSL). Some of us (myself included) even consider licenses like the AGPL to be nonfree. Free software can be used for any purpose, including competing with the original authors. If you can’t do whatever you want with the software, it’s not free software. If you want to open source your software but you want to put restrictions on what people can do with it, then, well, you don’t want to open source your software (and IMO the free software community would be better off without your free software cosplay).
    - segfaltnh 3y ago

hobofan 3y ago

> If after 6 years, Google tries to steal your lunch, you should have a brand, a team, and a community, that have spent the last few years preparing for a David versus Goliath-type fight. From my experience, for procurement people all of that (brand, community, team, DX) will matter close to 0 in comparison to compliance, etc, if you are going head-to-head with an existing supplier like Google.

awalias 3y ago
Great point! I should probably add that to the article. In our case (Supabase) we have indeed spent the last few years working on compliance (SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR etc.) in order to meet these requirements so your comment here is on point.

brap 3y ago

The list of main complaints against OSS they present here is (conveniently?) missing the biggest one, in my opinion: Your users can just host their own version instead of paying you. It seems like many OSS companies mitigate this by leaving out features from the OSS version or making the deployment more difficult than it should be. I’m not complaining, I think it’s fair, but this is the reality. It’s funny how they don’t address this one, but instead they list “oh no my code isn’t pretty” as a valid complaint against going OSS. Who cares.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
imiric 3y ago
This depends on the product. Sometimes self-hosting is not just a matter of starting some Docker containers, but takes work and resources to scale and maintain properly. It might not even be a matter of the OSS version lacking features, but about the nature of the product itself. For example, you can self-host WordPress if you want, and it's a perfectly capable product. But if you want to outsource the complexities around it, scale it easily, properly secure it, etc., it's worth considering using wordpress.com instead.
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  Isn't that a reflection of how bad WordPress is? That they haven't prioritised security and ease of use in the development of the product. This model definitely leads to some perverse incentives.
  - imiric 3y ago
    No, there are maintenance issues with hosting WordPress that go beyond just the product. You need a domain and TLS cert, storage, bandwidth, a curated list of plugins, and an easy way to scale it all. None of this is core to WordPress itself. I'm not a WP user, but see all the features on https://wordpress.com/features/ https://wordpress.com/features/. Grafana and its ecosystem of apps are another example. Sure, you technically could host and maintain it yourself, but Grafana Cloud streamlines all of that, which is worth paying for. This doesn't mean that Grafana products are intentionally limited, but that the commercial product offers value added features some users are willing to pay for. The fact that some companies take advantage of this model doesn't mean that the model itself doesn't work. They're just not good companies to begin with, and don't understand open source.

water9 3y ago

No unless you like, giving away the goose that lays the golden egg. How successful would Coca-Cola be today if they open sourced their company?

sneak 3y ago
The recipe for Coca-Cola is publicly available and is not legally protected or exclusive in any way. Many people make extremely similar cola beverages. Their business value is in brand and marketing, not any exclusive method of producing the product. You have inadvertently chosen a perfect example of why free software is better than proprietary software.
- water9 3y ago
  It’s called a trade secret it is not publicly open. It’s one of the best kept secrets of all time. What the hell are you talking about?
  - sneak 3y ago
    This is urban legend, just like the KFC “herbs and spices”. GC/MS is a thing. The recipe for Coke is literally published on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_formula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_formula The specifics of the Teller-Ulam design is one of the best kept secrets of all time. It’s impossible to keep secret the list of ingredients in a thing you literally provide for sale to any member of the general public. Don’t eat the pasta.
    - water9 3y ago
      There are three different versions of the recipe on the Wikipedia page… Obviously, Pepsi has gotten close, but there’s a reason Pepsi doesn’t taste like Coca-Cola, and a reason I buy Coca-Cola over Pepsi

sylware 3y ago

open source is not enough anymore... humanity needs "lean open source"... and stable in time.

throwaway63467 3y ago

I mean Supabase was initially a glue layer on top of existing open-source tools, not sure if they could’ve kept it closed source even if they wanted (though I guess most of the licenses of the stuff they used would allow it).

awalias 3y ago
This is true! Supabase db after all is "just" Postgres. In fact it's one of our product principles to adopt existing open source projects before writing our own. You're also correct on the second bit, everything in the stack is MIT, apache2, postgres licensed so it would have been ok to run a closed fork if we'd have been that way inclined.

jWhick 3y ago

The author is clearly a utopist, advertising and trying to promote his own oss views. However, while oss has its growing niche it's clear that it isn't for everyone. The thing to ask yourself before going oss path is what are you gaining by going oss and what are you trading for that gain. For supabase it's clearly beneficial to be oss, they are a niche database, and by going oss they can benefit a lot from integrations, not to mention they are basically ripping off the evil firebase. So by going oss they are perceived as heroes. On top of that who would use another closed firebase that isn't from google? They can't compete on pricing, nor the scale. I think supabase were even advertised as open source firbase at some point. However if you are not ripping off some popular commercial tool and making it open source, and making open source as your main differentiator, in that case there is very little to gain by going oss. You might as well get most of authors advertised "oss benefits" by just having great developer experience and docs, while giving very little in return.

satvikpendem 3y ago

Open sourcing your company doesn't make sense, in my view, unless you're targeting developers or you're building a product that no one would realistically self host anyway, with Supabase being a prime example of both. For just the latter, Plausible Analytics is one, where one could self host (I in fact do, via Coolify.io) but you'd lose out on updates unless you build your own CI/CD system to pull and merge updates from their releases.

gdcbe 3y ago

I understand you can give 1000's of reasons why it's fine. But it's still IMHO a sad reality that a giant cooperation cannot play it fair by being a corporate sponsor of the open source projects that they more or less wish to directly use as a service... I get that legally this is fine but ... Common... adapting FOSS for your own use cases in your basement or little company is still very different then a giant cooperation outcompeting you before you ever had a change... There might be room for a license to make FOSS software more like BSL if used by a company above a certain revenue threshold or w/e... Perhaps legally that's impossible, otherwise I have no idea why such a template does not exist yet.

snowstormsun 3y ago

I think many companies probably don't like to be open source because - they like the idea of "security through obscurity". Open source means more work patching found vulnerabilities, so they rather not publish their code and instead tick check-lists for compliance and do blackbox pentests which makes them look secure. - like to do marketing that exaggerates the innovation of their product. That's difficult to do if everyone can see the code.

nevodavid 3y ago

If you are interested in learning about open-source marketing, check: https://gitroom.com/blog https://gitroom.com/blog

jimjag 3y ago

Open Source is not a business model. Open Source is a licensing and development model.

tonyedgecombe 3y ago
>Open Source is a licensing and development model. With traits of a religion.
- dboreham 3y ago
  All of software development has those traits. Arguably everything humans do is like that.

gumby 3y ago

In this case the ends drive the means. "Should I open source my company" is a decision like "should we write our code in C++?" Without starting a flame war there are good and bad reasons to choose an implementation language and they should be driven by your business needs, whatever they are. The same is true for how you plan to license your code and what business model you build around it.

martypitt 3y ago

I love Supabase, commercial open source in general, and agree with lots of this post. However this comment feels off: > In software ideas are cheap. Value is almost always created in execution of ideas. I've heard this phrase around things like "I have this cool idea for a startup - will you sign my NDA before I tell you about it?" However, when you're open sourcing your software, you're not just providing an idea, but a significant portion of execution of that idea too. Sure, code isn't the full execution - that expands to sales / marketing / support / etc. However, the article is a little glib towards the value of the code, suggesting it's worthless without sales / marketing /etc. I don't think that's true.

codegeek 3y ago
"suggesting it's worthless without sales / marketing /etc. I don't think that's true." Code is not worthless but it almost is without sales/marketing/talking to customers. If I could split the value, it would be 90% sales/marketing/customer validation and 10% code. I run a low 7 figure bootstrapped SAAS (not open source) and I can tell you that code is mostly shit anyway and keeps evolving.
Towaway69 3y ago
I think code is worthless once it has been created. This is because the cost of copying is zero. You can't copy a house for zero but software yes. The process of creating the code and solving all those little unseen problems is for what developers are paid. Hence selling software is so profitable. If you don't sell software, you won't make money with it. Software is not like a physical object in a our shared reality.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

> Once your project reaches significant scale, you might find yourself in a situation like Elastic, or Mongo, where large cloud providers are offering your product with a superior distribution model. > Secondly, and more constructively, you should prepare for this eventuality by finding areas where you can outcompete anyone. Most cloud providers are notoriously bad at Developer Experience for example, so take advantage of that and make DX one of your core competencies. If after 6 years, Google tries to steal your lunch, you should have a brand, a team, and a community, that have spent the last few years preparing for a David versus Goliath-type fight. Make sure you're not blindsided by something like this by planning for it from the beginning. You have enough time and focus on your side to construct a winning strategy. Consider Google Firebase, which runs on Google Cloud and can access services from Google Cloud[1], but has a separate frontend, focused on DX rather then features, and imagine Amazon Supabase. [1]: https://firebase.google.com/firebase-and-gcp https://firebase.google.com/firebase-and-gcp

lmeyerov 3y ago

There is some tricky big assumption being made here around sustainable profitability that misses our lived reality, especially given challenges like US developer salaries. Paraphrasing, OSS companies need lightning to hit twice, first for the OSS and then again for the company. In our case, the Graphistry team loves and breathes OSS every day. We helped start what became the massively popular Apache Arrow and Nvidia RAPIDS projects, release our Python & JS clients as OSS, and PyGraphistry[AI] is a graph Swiss army knife, including tools like GFQL the only embeddable & dataframe-native & GPU-accelerated implementation of the Cypher graph query language.. ... But we sustainably grow primarily by selling cloud/on-prem self-hosting licenses to enterprises, govs, and data companies to our GPU graph viz server. Thankfully, after years of grinding, that business is growing well. As a natural experiment, our alternate SaaS hosting revenue does support a tiny team... but not the majority of our team. Most of our innovation cycles would disappear without our self-hosting license revenue. There's some cross of winning lottery ticket, SaaS market profile, and technical defensibility getting missed in the article that I can't put my finger on. Our launches of Louie.AI + GFQL are changing the OSS viability story in our particular case (I'd love to chat w successful founders here!), so I'm not saying it can't work, but our experience to get to this point makes me worried for new founders reading the article.

dcow 3y ago
Are the companies that buy your on prem solution buying the source code or the support? In other words if you said to them “hey the source is open now” would they say “oh cool we’ll be canceling our contract”?
- lmeyerov 3y ago
  Fair question! A good chunk would cancel, and at a minimum, switching to free sw / paid support would drop our product-related revenue by ~70-80%. Then again, we could make the software worse to trigger higher support hours, as complained by others in the thread about some OSS companies. Or really lean into it, going to full-blown consulting. However, switching to a consulting business has all sorts of negative externalities that can easily destroy the strengths and joys of a product culture. We actually do provide a growing side of professional services and roadmap acceleration for Graphistry & louie.ai (graph viz, graph AI, genAI, for data-intensive operational / investigative scenarios). By having our product licensing revenue the majority, we get to make sure there is stronger positive mutual alignment between us and our users, and our software and their long-term mission. As another natural experiment, I was interviewing someone from a company in the same space a few days ago that doesn't have this discipline. While our company is younger, our tech roadmap has been literally years ahead every year, and the software they deliver has no real upgrade path.. alignment helps when you care about your craft and customers. (And for HN'ers, it's a 5X+ on valuation multiple.)

wiradikusuma 3y ago

Are there many success stories for open source targeted at end-users? E.g. imagine if Photoshop is open source, would Adobe be financially successful?

dboreham 3y ago
No?
stehardcover 3y ago
Blender?

dudeinjapan 3y ago

Pro tip: Name your company "Open___" then don't open source it.

didgetmaster 3y ago

I feel like the third point (competitors) is a major concern that was just brushed aside. The 'just out-innovate them' approach might work if your startup is well funded with a very capable and nimble development team. But what if you are a fledgling startup with very limited resources. You have a very small team that struggles to do a fraction of the features on your 'TO DO' list. You don't have millions of VC dollars that enables your team to keep the wolves at bay. It wouldn't even take a tech giant like FAANG to outdo your project after forking your source. A medium-sized company could throw a dozen programmers on the project and their fork would surge ahead of the original with respect to features, support, and distribution. They could out-market you as well.

cuu508 3y ago
It would be interesting to see examples where this scenario played out.

lamontcg 3y ago

Probably not. Release your code publicly so people can read and contribute. Require paid licenses for commercial use over X numbers of seats where X is pretty generous and keep it free at the lowest tier. Those are hard things to claw back later without people completely losing their shit. Then the really hard part is to instill a culture inside your business that they paying customers are funding all the development and don't just obsess about the enterprise use case at the expense of all else. Keep showing the free tier people that you're listening to them. And that's what you'll fail at.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Does it provide more value for your business than it distracts from your business? That's a difficult calculation. Personally, I love open source, but I wouldn't open source a business unless I needed to.

dcow 3y ago

On the topic of open sourcing your core business, founders often worry that a competitor is going to take their source code, fork it, and directly compete with them. But, is there an actual example of this happening for real and the fork winning out and killing the incumbent in the market? I mean there’s a fork of Signal that doesn’t require a phone number (which is Signal’s heinous transgression if you poll HN) and we’re all still using Signal. And all you have to do to prevent bigcorp taking your stuff is slap the [A]GPL on it for “free users” (while still allowing others to purchase the source code under a more permissive license should they require it).

chandmkhn 3y ago

`And not one of them were ever required to solve a LeetCode problem over Zoom.` I can see some motivated developers benefit from this. But now those devs are working on someone's "open sourced" company for free thus growing someone's company in exchange for employability elsewhere. I can't shake of the feeling of borderline exploitation when I see the phrases 'my company" and "open source" next to each other.

dboreham 3y ago

OSS is a thing you buy, not a thing you sell.

seanwilson 3y ago

What about for desktop apps? Are there good examples of this? Unless you can offer some cloud/online/support service to go with it, there'd be no reason for most to pay?

freeopinion 3y ago

I think the question is meant to mean "Should my company open the source of its software?" But for me, answering the question as asked provides the path to answering the question as reworded. To me, the question as asked is about the nature of the software the company uses, not sells. I personally will always choose an open source product over the alternative, even if I happily pay for support or just donate to support the project. Unfettered access to the source is fundamental to me, even for software I never intend to alter. I know this seems to many like an extremist position. But I don't like the idea that I am not allowed to tear down my microwave or doorknob or transmission. I might never be able to put them back together in working order. Or I might be able to find a gear with a missing tooth and execute a $2 repair instead of a $90 replacement. Or I might invent a new frakenstein microwave with a tranmission. Extending the featureset of a web server or understanding why my plugin is crashing the host app, etc. are important to me. I think they are important to society. So I hold on to my open source extremism. If you show me the hottest new tiny web server that can do HTTPS/4 with built-in AI in just 5Kb, I will be intrigued, but if it isn't open source, I'll stick with my current stack. With this mindset, the software I produce is open source. And sometimes people pay me for it.

lgkk 3y ago

Really like the pointer to the well known security. First time I actually saw anyone mention it on something popular.

astro- 3y ago

I'd say that open-source works best for companies when they don't open the main thing. Meta building React in the open is a good example. The community gets a well-maintained library. Meta gets free testing, code contributions and potential hiring pipeline. When trying to compete with Meta, React gives you virtually no advantage. There's no incentive to leave important features out of the public codebase. Both Meta and the community benefit. Would it make sense for Meta to open the codebase for facebook.com? Aside from studying/scrutinising the code, the only other thing you'd be able to do with it is to change the logo and try to compete with Facebook. In this example, it's still probably not enough to disrupt them thanks to the social graph and infrastructure complexity. But you could imagine moments where even Meta gets nervous when anyone can start competing with feature parity from day one. Over the long-term, it's more likely that Meta would want to keep some features private. It's also less likely that they would get lots of quality contributions back. If you're running a fb.com clone in production, you're likely trying to compete with them on some level. This leads to a weird relationship with the community and limited value for both sides.

thomastjeffery 3y ago

I think the distinguishing question is, "Is the company's software a tool used to fulfill the company's goals, or is the software itself the goal of the company?" If your answer is the latter, then you have more problems in store than open-source viability. You aren't genuinely testing/dogfooding your product. Your product goals will trend away from real customer value and toward implementation convenience, self-compatibility, 3rd-party incompatibility, and a closed-minded product vision. The only way to keep this business model viable is to monopolize your market. But will it be you monopolizing, or will it be FAANG?

glitchc 3y ago

Well, Microsoft invented the "sale of proprietary software as a license to end-users" model. Red Hat, on the other hand, offers value-added services on top of open-source software. It's easy to compare their relative market valuations.

jdwyah 3y ago

Just kicked off a project to explore open-sourcing what we've built (VC funded). I'm considering a different tack which I think may be interesting. We have a lot of client libraries, already open sourced. Then we have the hosted APIs and DB which are not open. Making all the close-source stuff open, feels like a big effort, with an unclear reward and more likely that we just end up with a hard to install OS project, since it feels like the hosting expertise _is_ part of the core value prop. What I'm excited about though is whether we could take the hosted piece out of the equation and find something that is pretty different, but has its own niche. For us this would be replacing the web UI and DB hosting of the paid product, with a CLI and simpler git based hosting for an open source version. ie If you want hosted feature flags, we think you should use the hosted thing, but if you want gitops style feature flags (100% reliable), then use the OS version. I like the idea that we could really focus on making the open version great in its niche, but have a super clear line about what is paid / hosted, to help us avoid the complexity of always needing to decide how to nerf the OS version.

brylie 3y ago

We are building some educational video games and considering starting a company to help sustain the effort. If possible, it would be great to publish the source code and game assets as free/open software and free cultural works. However, I’m not sure about a business model to fund continuous research and development. Is anyone here working on or aware of any open source game studios with sustainable funding/revenue? Any other advice or consideration about licensing and business models? Thanks in advance :-)

fuddle 3y ago

I'm not sure if an MIT license is sustainable long term. I see most open source companies adapt AGPL, open core or source available licenses.

wseqyrku 3y ago

This seems to work fine for Temporalio.