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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,

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.)

dcow 3y ago
If you said “our source is now available under the AGPL, if you’d like to keep using the software without reverse licensing modifications and your patents you’ll need to remain on your current plan”, how many would walk? Or similar, “our software is open source but still requires a license for commercial use” would 70-80% give you the middle finger and say okay sue us then? Just curious if there is a dual licensing strategy that could work for you. I mean think about it, the companies you’ve sold the software to have now seen your sources. If they could take the code and do it better themselves and it was just a question of “knowing the secret sauce” then wouldn’t 70-80% of them have done so (if your claim is accurate). There’s something else happening here. They’re paying for your team to maintain the software and provide continual updates. Getting the source code is most likely an implementation detail to the purchaser. Open source doesn't mean free as in free beer. It’s a myth that you can’t charge a company for an open source product.
- auggierose 3y ago
  I think you got a pretty clear answer to that already in the parent answer. Of course, you could keep insisting that open source should work for them.
  - dcow 3y ago
    I’m not asking the same question twice. Read carefully. And the comment I responded to was edited. I’m not insisting anything. A lot of people assume open source means free as in beer and don’t even realize dual licensing is an option.
ensignavenger 3y ago
A deeper question would be to examine if your product mindshare would grow significantly if your product were open source, and if this growth would lead to a combination kf the following that would overcome the loss is subscribers: 1) Contributions from the community (bug reports, code, promotion, documentation, and feedback are all valuable contributions, but they take work to leverage, and some companies choose not to put in the work). 2) More users means more potential subscribers to the cloud and support licenses. (What percent of these new users would convert to paid support licenses or cloud hosting customers?). 3) Other new ways to garner financial support from the community? (Patronage, paid feature development, ???).
- lmeyerov 3y ago
  I agree with those perspectives, they're questions we talk about and analyze: - We do in fact operate multiple OSS repos. Despite their usage, most, as with most OSS in general, do not get significant code-based contributions. Our proprietary repos are even more complicated (e.g., distributed GPU code, webgl shaders, and "boring" enterprise bits), where we'd expect even less involvement. Instead, they see other values from the OSS community like easier bug reporting and, as you say, easier for folks to see if the tool is for them. Writeups like Supabases misses this nuance in practice, focusing just on the rarer lottery ticket scenario. (Which is natural to come from a marketing / devrel person that got hired after-the-fact: selection bias in action.) - Our customers do pay for feature development even without the OSS Most of all, as you say, maybe marketshare can grow! But in my original point, now that's counting on lightning to strike twice, once for OSS and then again for the company. That's a very big decision when many people's lives -- and their families -- are making bets here. We're actually reexamining the economics of this question now that much more is known and we have more stability. Much trickier than the blogpost makes out!
  - ensignavenger 3y ago
    Yeah, I don't expect a really nuanced blog post from a marketing department... For your open source repos, how much effort is put into inviting contributions and making it easy to contribute? Growing an open source community is a lot of work, and is a skillset apart from (but not always exclusive of) software development and business development. Many projects don't try, or don't do a good job of it. Some projects (may e most famously SQLite) openly state that they have no interest in outside contributions. (Its a legitimate choice, but the consequences are obvious).

dcow 3y ago

If you said “our source is now available under the AGPL, if you’d like to keep using the software without reverse licensing modifications and your patents you’ll need to remain on your current plan”, how many would walk? Or similar, “our software is open source but still requires a license for commercial use” would 70-80% give you the middle finger and say okay sue us then? Just curious if there is a dual licensing strategy that could work for you. I mean think about it, the companies you’ve sold the software to have now seen your sources. If they could take the code and do it better themselves and it was just a question of “knowing the secret sauce” then wouldn’t 70-80% of them have done so (if your claim is accurate). There’s something else happening here. They’re paying for your team to maintain the software and provide continual updates. Getting the source code is most likely an implementation detail to the purchaser. Open source doesn't mean free as in free beer. It’s a myth that you can’t charge a company for an open source product.

auggierose 3y ago
I think you got a pretty clear answer to that already in the parent answer. Of course, you could keep insisting that open source should work for them.
- dcow 3y ago
  I’m not asking the same question twice. Read carefully. And the comment I responded to was edited. I’m not insisting anything. A lot of people assume open source means free as in beer and don’t even realize dual licensing is an option.

ensignavenger 3y ago

A deeper question would be to examine if your product mindshare would grow significantly if your product were open source, and if this growth would lead to a combination kf the following that would overcome the loss is subscribers: 1) Contributions from the community (bug reports, code, promotion, documentation, and feedback are all valuable contributions, but they take work to leverage, and some companies choose not to put in the work). 2) More users means more potential subscribers to the cloud and support licenses. (What percent of these new users would convert to paid support licenses or cloud hosting customers?). 3) Other new ways to garner financial support from the community? (Patronage, paid feature development, ???).

lmeyerov 3y ago
I agree with those perspectives, they're questions we talk about and analyze: - We do in fact operate multiple OSS repos. Despite their usage, most, as with most OSS in general, do not get significant code-based contributions. Our proprietary repos are even more complicated (e.g., distributed GPU code, webgl shaders, and "boring" enterprise bits), where we'd expect even less involvement. Instead, they see other values from the OSS community like easier bug reporting and, as you say, easier for folks to see if the tool is for them. Writeups like Supabases misses this nuance in practice, focusing just on the rarer lottery ticket scenario. (Which is natural to come from a marketing / devrel person that got hired after-the-fact: selection bias in action.) - Our customers do pay for feature development even without the OSS Most of all, as you say, maybe marketshare can grow! But in my original point, now that's counting on lightning to strike twice, once for OSS and then again for the company. That's a very big decision when many people's lives -- and their families -- are making bets here. We're actually reexamining the economics of this question now that much more is known and we have more stability. Much trickier than the blogpost makes out!
- ensignavenger 3y ago
  Yeah, I don't expect a really nuanced blog post from a marketing department... For your open source repos, how much effort is put into inviting contributions and making it easy to contribute? Growing an open source community is a lot of work, and is a skillset apart from (but not always exclusive of) software development and business development. Many projects don't try, or don't do a good job of it. Some projects (may e most famously SQLite) openly state that they have no interest in outside contributions. (Its a legitimate choice, but the consequences are obvious).