4 ms·

I'll never understand the "we are open source but lock $cool_but_essential_features behind an enterprise license." Unless you plan to charge less than what a s

• MoOmer 3y ago
  Those patches are unlikely to be officially supported, though. I really support this mode of monetization, because community/free users get something, well, free, while others get something more for a bit more. It’s [hopefully] sustainable for the engineers and team behind the product, too!
  • mike_d 3y ago
    So sell support? Seems to work really well for a lot of companies.
    • rapsey 3y ago
      No it does not. It is a garbage business model that killed the vast majority of companies pursuing it. The rest barely make a living. https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-want-to-be-the-next-red-hat/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-wa...
      • panta 3y ago
        While the underlying idea that selling services on open source products is not sustainable from a purely business perspective may be true, the linked article is not particularly convincing to me, it doesn't provide strong evidences and it's based on an embarrassingly small sample size. Besides, maybe we should start to consider also other metrics when we evaluate a Business success, not only the mere economic profit: there are externalized societal benefits (and damages) that are very important and nonetheless poorly accounted for.
      • markhahn 3y ago
        "barely make a living" is what a normal business aims for.
      • graemep 3y ago
        That article is badly flawed. It only looks at one open source company, that could not have closed source its product (because it was not the original developer) so it could only exist at all as an (at least mostly) open source business and compares it to companies in entirely different lines of business. It was also badly outdated a few years after the article was written when the said business was acquired for several times the market cap at the time the article was written. If you want to compare it to businesses offering a similar product into a similar market you should compare it to other OS vendors founded in the 90s targetting desktops and servers. Any more successful proprietary examples around? Most of all the article only looks at one, open source business. Not exactly a meaningful sample. It is probably very difficult to rely on that model if a single company is the original developer and the main developer - so you have all the costs but share the benefits. It is not true if you fork code that already exists, or if you have a bazaar development mode.
    • daviesliu 3y ago
      The company may want the product to be difficult to use, so they can sell more support, that's not win-win for both sides.
• 1propionyl 3y ago
  You don't pay for features. You pay for support.
  • dspillett 3y ago
    Well, yes. But also no. If you need/want a feature that is only included in the non-F/OSS release, then you are not just paying for the support.
• School-Cotton 3y ago
  In theory you’re right, but in most companies the friction of spinning up a team to manage the custom patch set of each piece of open-core software they use would dominate the actual effort needed to implement the features. It’s just not in most company’s DNA to operate this way. (Also, a lot of SaaS is in fact cheaper than what a dev makes in half a year).
  • nijave 3y ago
    Cloud providers are making a killing on their ability to spin these types of teams up