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Curious why you decided to open source your entire product. Are you moving to an open core model? I’d expect in that case that much of 2, 3 & 4 would have staye

Curious why you decided to open source your entire product. Are you moving to an open core model? I’d expect in that case that much of 2, 3 & 4 would have stayed closed. Would be grateful if you can share your reasoning

robertlagrant 2y ago
This is often the move when the team's spent the money developing something and now the end's in sight, so they want the chance to leave and take the code with them. Don't know if this is that at all, but it's always worth considering.
- e1g 2y ago
  That is almost certainly what’s happening here. They raised $3M three years ago, at the peak of evaluations, and don’t have the metrics to raise a Series A in the current climate. Running out of money and want to leave some artifact behind. A very difficult and emotional transition.
- hackernewds 2y ago
  I don't understand the "leave the code with them" part
  - learnedbytes 2y ago
    I think they mean by open sourcing, they can take the code to a new startup without having IP legality issues.
    - tomhallett 2y ago
      Would open sourcing the core IP of a company “typically” require board approval? If a company goes under, the investors will want to sell off the IP, open sourcing everything would make that IP less valueable. There must be some blanket clause in the term sheet to cover that, right? Ie: founders won’t do anything which will materially hurt the company without board approval (or something, I am no where close to a lawyer, this is all conjecture)
      - throwup238 2y ago
        If it mattered it would have become part of VC contracts years ago. Early stage VCs make money on the big winners, not on the tail end of companies that don’t exit for 100x. For the most part, except for patents the IP is worth less than the Aeron chairs at the end.
      - re-thc 2y ago
        > Would open sourcing the core IP of a company “typically” require board approval? At this stage, if they can't raise a series A I'd assume they still have a majority of the "board" to themselves.
  - cess11 2y ago
    You can look at the history of Erlang for a similar example. A very crude summary could be that Ericsson developed the language, took it to production, and then they decided to replace it with Java. The people that did the language design convinced management to release Erlang and the VM as FOSS, and then they promptly went and started a company that could use the tooling they'd developed. I'm aware I'm leaving out a lot of detail, but it's not clear to me what has become public knowledge and what has not and I happen to know some people that were involved.
krawczstef 2y ago
getting into enterprise is hard, so probably trying open source to help with that.
- saigal 2y ago
  Enterprises are spending lots of time and money on this. The biggest issue that has slowed down sales cycle at this stage has been data governance. Most folks think it’s about accuracy or latency (which of course is an issue) but data governance can make this whole thing a non starter.
  - edmundsauto 2y ago
    Can you explain more about why governance is the issue with a service like this? Companies not wanting their data to go off prem?
    - saigal 2y ago
      yes. some want BYOC solutions. others don't want to even be perceived as being used to train an LLM. not to mention CCPA, GDPR, etc etc etc. lots of questions around what data is being sent to the LLM, or just schema.
      - edmundsauto 2y ago
        Interesting. So by open sourcing you think companies can self host and it negates some of these issues? Or is your goal into increase future contributions to keep the project alive and developing? What % of the NL -> SQL problem is solved in the current version? Ie is this something ready for some type of prod work now, or is it “in 2-3 years we’ll be there”?
        aazo11 2y ago
        There are organizations using Dataherald in production right now. The latency is ~20-30s and it takes some set up, so as long as those are not blockers it can be used in prod.

robertlagrant 2y ago

This is often the move when the team's spent the money developing something and now the end's in sight, so they want the chance to leave and take the code with them. Don't know if this is that at all, but it's always worth considering.

e1g 2y ago
That is almost certainly what’s happening here. They raised $3M three years ago, at the peak of evaluations, and don’t have the metrics to raise a Series A in the current climate. Running out of money and want to leave some artifact behind. A very difficult and emotional transition.
hackernewds 2y ago
I don't understand the "leave the code with them" part
- learnedbytes 2y ago
  I think they mean by open sourcing, they can take the code to a new startup without having IP legality issues.
  - tomhallett 2y ago
    Would open sourcing the core IP of a company “typically” require board approval? If a company goes under, the investors will want to sell off the IP, open sourcing everything would make that IP less valueable. There must be some blanket clause in the term sheet to cover that, right? Ie: founders won’t do anything which will materially hurt the company without board approval (or something, I am no where close to a lawyer, this is all conjecture)
    - throwup238 2y ago
      If it mattered it would have become part of VC contracts years ago. Early stage VCs make money on the big winners, not on the tail end of companies that don’t exit for 100x. For the most part, except for patents the IP is worth less than the Aeron chairs at the end.
    - re-thc 2y ago
      > Would open sourcing the core IP of a company “typically” require board approval? At this stage, if they can't raise a series A I'd assume they still have a majority of the "board" to themselves.
- cess11 2y ago
  You can look at the history of Erlang for a similar example. A very crude summary could be that Ericsson developed the language, took it to production, and then they decided to replace it with Java. The people that did the language design convinced management to release Erlang and the VM as FOSS, and then they promptly went and started a company that could use the tooling they'd developed. I'm aware I'm leaving out a lot of detail, but it's not clear to me what has become public knowledge and what has not and I happen to know some people that were involved.

krawczstef 2y ago

getting into enterprise is hard, so probably trying open source to help with that.

saigal 2y ago
Enterprises are spending lots of time and money on this. The biggest issue that has slowed down sales cycle at this stage has been data governance. Most folks think it’s about accuracy or latency (which of course is an issue) but data governance can make this whole thing a non starter.
- edmundsauto 2y ago
  Can you explain more about why governance is the issue with a service like this? Companies not wanting their data to go off prem?
  - saigal 2y ago
    yes. some want BYOC solutions. others don't want to even be perceived as being used to train an LLM. not to mention CCPA, GDPR, etc etc etc. lots of questions around what data is being sent to the LLM, or just schema.
    - edmundsauto 2y ago
      Interesting. So by open sourcing you think companies can self host and it negates some of these issues? Or is your goal into increase future contributions to keep the project alive and developing? What % of the NL -> SQL problem is solved in the current version? Ie is this something ready for some type of prod work now, or is it “in 2-3 years we’ll be there”?
      - aazo11 2y ago
        There are organizations using Dataherald in production right now. The latency is ~20-30s and it takes some set up, so as long as those are not blockers it can be used in prod.