4 ms·

A lot of the comments here are along the lines of “this is fine. They should be able to make money to survive. Stop complaining or forkit. This is what open cor

by pm90 3y ago

A lot of the comments here are along the lines of “this is fine. They should be able to make money to survive. Stop complaining or forkit. This is what open core is”. IMO I don’t think this is what open core is. Open Core should mean that, if a user is not happy with a commercial offering, they are able to roll their own. Perhaps it would take them a bit of time operationally to do this. Maybe they need to spin up their own infra (eg cloud VMs, cloud database etc) but this should be possible for them to do this within a reasonable amount of time. I think the change being rejected here is fundamental to the operation of this tool. Without SAML auth, you simply cannot deploy it yourself for your internal users. I am willing and open to other views on this. But I am not convinced that project owners should be allowed to call their project open core without having some reasonable burden to allow the software to be self hosted.

bbkane 3y ago
I think open core means the authors maintain a less capable open source version of their project. I don't think there's any expectations beyond that about internal hosting capabilities or anything else, certainly not in the license anyway.
gtirloni 3y ago
> but this should be possible for them to do this within a reasonable amount of time That's not the end game of any "open core" company I have ever seen. They usually will restrict certain software features only to paying customers. From Wikipedia [0]: > The open-core model is a business model for the monetization of commercially produced open-source software. The open-core model primarily involves offering a "core" or feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary software. The term was coined by Andrew Lampitt in 2008. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model
anthomtb 3y ago
Maybe its my grug-brain showing up but could you not: 1) Clone the latest version of the tool 2) Apply the patches needed for this feature 3) Profit. Or is there some reason why the change has to live in the "main" branch for the official project on github?
- danenania 3y ago
  You could, but then you will have to continuously monitor the main branch and pull in updates if you want new features, bug fixes, security updates etc., and possibly you'll need to deal with merge conflicts. You might also need custom release, install, and upgrade tooling for your fork. And if there are bugs in anything that has diverged, it will be up to you to fix those yourself. It's significant extra work, in short.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Can you fork it? If so it's open source, if not, it's not. There's no subjectivity for you to have an opinion differently. And yes, the authors are free to run their project any way they want. You are free to not interact with them if you don't want, and since they published the code, you are also free to fork it. Open core is an incredibly hard model to get right. Make your code too free, and you are at the risk of being pushed off the market by some large player that doesn't need to invest on it; make your code too closed and you'll become an asshole and your customers will go away. Often the margin here is negative, and both too free and too close intersect instead of having some space between them.
SergeAx 3y ago
> Without SAML auth, you simply cannot deploy it yourself for your internal users Of course you can, you just need to do (relatively small) extra job syncing credentials with your IDP.

by pm90 3y ago

bbkane 3y ago

I think open core means the authors maintain a less capable open source version of their project. I don't think there's any expectations beyond that about internal hosting capabilities or anything else, certainly not in the license anyway.

gtirloni 3y ago

> but this should be possible for them to do this within a reasonable amount of time That's not the end game of any "open core" company I have ever seen. They usually will restrict certain software features only to paying customers. From Wikipedia [0]: > The open-core model is a business model for the monetization of commercially produced open-source software. The open-core model primarily involves offering a "core" or feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary software. The term was coined by Andrew Lampitt in 2008. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model

anthomtb 3y ago

Maybe its my grug-brain showing up but could you not: 1) Clone the latest version of the tool 2) Apply the patches needed for this feature 3) Profit. Or is there some reason why the change has to live in the "main" branch for the official project on github?

danenania 3y ago
You could, but then you will have to continuously monitor the main branch and pull in updates if you want new features, bug fixes, security updates etc., and possibly you'll need to deal with merge conflicts. You might also need custom release, install, and upgrade tooling for your fork. And if there are bugs in anything that has diverged, it will be up to you to fix those yourself. It's significant extra work, in short.

marcosdumay 3y ago

Can you fork it? If so it's open source, if not, it's not. There's no subjectivity for you to have an opinion differently. And yes, the authors are free to run their project any way they want. You are free to not interact with them if you don't want, and since they published the code, you are also free to fork it. Open core is an incredibly hard model to get right. Make your code too free, and you are at the risk of being pushed off the market by some large player that doesn't need to invest on it; make your code too closed and you'll become an asshole and your customers will go away. Often the margin here is negative, and both too free and too close intersect instead of having some space between them.

SergeAx 3y ago

> Without SAML auth, you simply cannot deploy it yourself for your internal users Of course you can, you just need to do (relatively small) extra job syncing credentials with your IDP.