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> In order for your product to gain traction, that strategy requires users to suffer up the learning curve without your help, or it requires you to offer free s
by danellis 14y ago
> In order for your product to gain traction, that strategy requires users to suffer up the learning curve without your help, or it requires you to offer free support to non-paying customers.
That wasn't how I was looking at it. I was thinking of it more as being a free product for those people who can comfortably use it without support, and essentially a paid product for people who need the support. Isn't that the usual "open source for enterprise" model -- for example, Red Hat?
> To come back to my final question, are you going to use this PaaS to build the PaaS?
I'm not sure how that question makes sense. It's a piece of software, not something we're deploying ourselves. If it was open source, it would probably be hosted (source, downloads, documentation and all) on GitHub. Of course we'll have 'dummy' apps we deploy with it for testing, but that's not the PaaS itself.
- brudgers 14y ago1. My understanding is that Red Hat started out selling Red Hat Linux on disks - the internet in 1994 was not much of a distribution channel for large pieces of software. I would add that the attractiveness of a free OS can justify a larger expenditure on support than most tools - i.e. Red Hat solved a big problem for a lot of IT organizations with deep pockets. see: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/History_of_Red_Hat_Linux http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/History_of_Red_Hat_Linux