You can make suggestions to move features between tiers, i.e. moving a paid feature to the free tier, by opening an issue following https://about.gitlab.com/company/pricing/#changing-tiers-and...
> If we normalize projects baiting developers with an open source license to gain traction and switching to a non-open source license to monopolize the returns on that traction, then the logical next step for investors will be skipping that first step entirely.
> And that, for the industry, is nothing but a dead end.
- redmonk.com/sogrady, https://archive.is/GN2Bd
GitLab is, imo, one of the best examples of how to do paid open source. Especially because they've gone about it without the relicensing switch that many companies have attempted in order to "protect their business/product."
But where would traction come from, then? Switching to a proprietary license works well because they're baiting devs, if investors skip that step there's not as much to monopolise. Or am I misreading that paragraph?
Of course, there's other 'grey-pattern' techniques that open-core systems use (eg. the notorious https://sso.tax) that can also help build companies around but it's important to note that a small 10-100 person company has very different "app visibility/reporting/analytics" needs than a 1000 person corporate with multi-level hierarchies, and it's very much possible to build out a profitable company that builds a community with the 10-100 person startup via open source offerings that work perfectly for their use-cases while charging the companies that want something that "just works" for them for a lot of the advanced non-core stuff (and services).
Clustering and replication isn't the easiest but that's mostly because it just hasn't been a focus of the postgres machine -- they're making changes that are a bit more fundamental and in my opinion pressing.
Most startups just need to scale a postgres server vertically, not horizontally.
Cany anybody help me out and mention some setup details a blissful idiot like myself might be neglecting in their postgres cluster-ups?
The cluster of 3+ servers must remain consistent, available, and not lose committed transactions when a minority of servers (including the former master) fails.
I'm currently building an app I hope will appeal to the HN crowd, and I was planning on making the full source available to all customers - this would be billed as a feature of the product.
I can't count the number of times I was happily using a closed source product only to find a bug or missing feature that I really wished I could just make a small tweak to add/fix. I didn't need the app to be open source or anything, I just wanted to be able to see what was running and make a small change myself. For many of these situations I would happily commit the patch back to the commercial product, just so that my experience would be nicer.
I want to be able to charge for and sell my app, but I would like all my users to be able to see exactly what's running under the hood, and be able to tweak and modify it for their own personal use. (I also plan on including an extensive public extension API. Extensions can also be open source of course.)
To me this seems like a fairly good sweet spot, as I really do need to charge to be able to support the development. I could even see committing to always keeping the source available to users, or to open source it if I ever stop commercial development of the product. I hope this appeals to folks here, because I can't see a better model that will support a single developer as I go.
Even potentially more difficult is getting your change accepted by the software vendor to where it's now incorporated in to the production product.
I mean, this is nothing new, this happens with open source projects all the time, but it can be a difference in scope depending on the level that your company actually relies on some product for their operations.
Personally I think it should be the default distribution model for software. If I'm relying on a piece of software, especially one I paid for, doubly-especially if it's running on my machine, I should have the right to modify it and probably to distribute my modifications.
I hope I am wrong and do wish you to succeed. But Not Strictly Open Source doesn't appeal much to HN crowd.
I don't think this is true. "Open Source" But Not Really is what gets criticized here, such as Elasticsearch's new license.
Things that want to benefit from calling themselves open source while restricting user freedoms.
Source available on the other hand is exactly what it claims to be. It's more open than strictly closed source and less free than fully open source.
In order to make any use of the project, users also have to be trustees. This model allows restrictions on what they use it for, what they disclose, &c, because users must agree to certain terms as part of becoming trustees.
Because the development company is a trustee, their incentives are different from those of software companies that own IP: trustees have a fiduciary duty to act in the interests of beneficiaries (even though trust management companies can have their own shares and shareholders, they nevertheless have a fiduciary duty to the beneficiaries).
One of the benefits of open source is that it's possible to arrange for succession if a company stalls out. No one is breaking the law by continuing to develop on the basis of the old IP. Organizing the software as a trust with users as beneficiaries makes it relatively easy to manage succession, as well, since the beneficiaries are the ultimate owners of the property contained in the trust and have a power to appoint new trustees as well as remove old ones.
+ SLA and support models (including updates, delivery, integration, etc)
+ Hosted vs. self-hosted
+ Procurement models
+ Compliance models
+ Legal, licensing, IP models
The last 3 may be most applicable in the enterprise part of the market, but can be critical there. Enterprise also often has 'features' which are driven by admin, ops, security, procurement and compliance teams. These 'features' may make sense to limit to the SaaS, partially to keep the FOSS clean, and don't conflict with a mission of user-facing feature equivalence between FOSS and SaaS.
I don't understand this assertion. One of the main perverse incentives affecting open core software quality is that the more help people need with the software, the more they'll value support. This article about open core incentives regarding software quality just handwaves this away.
The other demotivator is that having your (OSS) open core be good means that if you make any user-hostile business-motivated demands, somebody will simply fork you and take over your business.
The best defense against the latter is the GPL. Make your competition share all of their work while you don't have to. And ask yourself: if your strategy is going to be to leverage an OSS application to sell proprietary accessories, why be bitchy about copyleft? It's the best of both worlds - open enough that you're contributing to the commons, and restrictive enough that you (as the copyright holder) can still play games with licensing keys and obfuscation to accomplish business objectives. If the community forks your GPL core and publicly builds on it better than you do behind closed doors, it means that you've been outcompeted fair and square.
Can't your competitor then just release their contributions as AGPL? Of course, you're free not to accept their contributions, but under the AGPL you can no longer merge their contributions back into your commercial product without having to share all of your work too.
(Yes, usual caveats about the scope of "the work" apply. But that applies just as much to your competitors as to you)
Also, commercial open source != free. You can't use Docker Desktop commercially without a license and it's not 100% OSS. Many companies use open source-washing as a way to lure customers into yet another proprietary system that dresses itself up as FOSS.
Furthermore, most commercial open source community versions are crippleware hiding useful features behind closed-source, paid-subscription-only offers. And, the CE versions are usually out-of-date and are slow to receive security updates. SugarCRM comes to mind.
Good enough means b2b. Consumer-facing stuff generally has a much better UI/UX than b2b stuff, because consumers care.
