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Open core is a tried and true business model. It’s essentially just freemium, which businesses have done forever. If a healthy proprietary product can be built

Open core is a tried and true business model. It’s essentially just freemium, which businesses have done forever. If a healthy proprietary product can be built on the open source base, that’s a win-win. The company gets revenue and a sustainable business; the community gets free open source software with a highly motivated steward. There’s no reason to relicense if it works. Things can go wrong in various ways of course, and drawing the line in the right place is a challenge, but that doesn’t mean that every VC-backed open core product is doomed to relicense. There are many examples of it working out well for both the company and community.

the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
Open core in practical terms keeps many useful parts away of a product. A good example of this is clickhouse recently which keeps some of the most interesting features locked to the cloud version exclusively.
- ezekg 2y ago
  This is the reason why I believe Fair Core [0] is superior to open core, because the former eventually open sources everything, while the latter never open sources the useful parts. That's actually one of the main reasons I relicensed to the FCL from the ELv2 [1]. [0]: https://fcl.dev https://fcl.dev [1]: https://keygen.sh/blog/keygen-is-now-fair-source/ https://keygen.sh/blog/keygen-is-now-fair-source/
- danenania 2y ago
  > Open core in practical terms keeps many useful parts away of a product. Well yeah of course. If nothing useful is held back, no one is likely to buy the paid version of the product. That's how freemium works. If you're relying on an open source project, you should want it to have a sustainable business backing it, and that means there needs to be a reasonable balance between free and paid features. If a project isn't helping anyone make money, no one is likely to do all the thankless tasks required to keep it healthy and growing, and there's a good chance it will end up abandoned eventually.
  - the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
    And if people want to run Open Core businesses I don't want to stop them. I just happen to believe that Fair Source is a better tradeoff than Open Core because it means that if the company goes under, you have a guarantee that _all_ of their stuff (that you relied on) becomes Open Source.
    - danenania 2y ago
      Ok, that definitely helps to clarify your point—thanks. But in that case, it sounds like the specific concern is more about open sourcing any proprietary components if the company fails, which seems orthogonal to the specific license. A provision like that would also be fully compatible with open core.

the_mitsuhiko 2y ago

Open core in practical terms keeps many useful parts away of a product. A good example of this is clickhouse recently which keeps some of the most interesting features locked to the cloud version exclusively.

ezekg 2y ago
This is the reason why I believe Fair Core [0] is superior to open core, because the former eventually open sources everything, while the latter never open sources the useful parts. That's actually one of the main reasons I relicensed to the FCL from the ELv2 [1]. [0]: https://fcl.dev https://fcl.dev [1]: https://keygen.sh/blog/keygen-is-now-fair-source/ https://keygen.sh/blog/keygen-is-now-fair-source/
danenania 2y ago
> Open core in practical terms keeps many useful parts away of a product. Well yeah of course. If nothing useful is held back, no one is likely to buy the paid version of the product. That's how freemium works. If you're relying on an open source project, you should want it to have a sustainable business backing it, and that means there needs to be a reasonable balance between free and paid features. If a project isn't helping anyone make money, no one is likely to do all the thankless tasks required to keep it healthy and growing, and there's a good chance it will end up abandoned eventually.
- the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
  And if people want to run Open Core businesses I don't want to stop them. I just happen to believe that Fair Source is a better tradeoff than Open Core because it means that if the company goes under, you have a guarantee that _all_ of their stuff (that you relied on) becomes Open Source.
  - danenania 2y ago
    Ok, that definitely helps to clarify your point—thanks. But in that case, it sounds like the specific concern is more about open sourcing any proprietary components if the company fails, which seems orthogonal to the specific license. A provision like that would also be fully compatible with open core.