You are misguided. Here's what the company that employs me does:
- develop an open source product. Open to contributions, but most of the dev is done by employees.
- sell support and consulting on this product
- sell pre-packaged open source extensions to this product, with support
Totally withing the free software / open source spirit. The world gets great open source software for free (not open core: truly and completely open source), and the business behind it is sustainable as well. We also donate to some open source projects that we use, chosen by employees.
At some point, if you want open source to take over, you need it to grow and strive, and having it supported by business is a great way of getting this. The world probably cannot be run only by side projects.
Not saying that all open source companies behave this well, but it's not an impossible outcome.
1. Open source product
2. ???
3. Profit!
Open source isn’t a magical bandaid though it may get you some early traction, the same you can get by having a free plan.
If you develop it appropriately and plan it out, it CAN be successful. But you have to think it out and choose an appropriate license, etc.
Most successful open source companies would have been successful as closed-source; and you rarely can take a closed-source product and make it successful by going open source.
I'm with you on this. You need to carefully plan. I also strongly believe you should not go with VC money. That excludes "burning money and we'll figure it out later". Your open source project will therefore probably start as a side project and/or with government help dedicated to business creators.
> Most successful open source companies would have been successful as closed-source
I believe this too. Now, there are more and more things that require open source products. Open source companies, including the one I work at, have received funds from openDesk [1] to develop a complete suit of open source tools. More and more research labs, universities and public institutions require open source. So there's a dedicated market that's growing.
You may succeed as a closed source company, probably more easily than as an open source company. But the story is not that clear cut, and it also depends on what you want to build and whether you really want to build that awesome product as closed source.
At some point the incentives become misaligned, though, we've seen this happen over and over.
Someone proposes and sends a PR making huge quality of life improvements, it's shot down because it would reduce consulting revenue (the rejection reason is officially not this or not even stated at all).
Someone proposes and sends a PR implementing advanced functionality that the core company sells as part of a paid extension, the PR is rejected (for obvious but not mentioned reasons).
A cloud provider starts offering a service based on the software, the license is changed to non open source.
Plus, these kinds of businesses generally only scale to mom and pop store or maybe 100 consultants.
Of course I would indeed expect a contribution that:
- tries to disable our licensing mechanism in our paid extensions
- tries to copy our paid extension code to our product or to a community extension
To be rejected upstream. But isn't it fair game? They can still fork the code and go start something on their own, it's one of the important features of open source. One can start a new extension repository and convince users to add it to their config, or even fork the product and provide this by default. But this is work, they'll have to maintain this, and will probably depend on us, in the end.
Most likely, we would welcome significant contributions and QoL improvements, we are only so many people for that much work to do, improvements would allow us to focus on something else. If someone outside the company is willing to maintain some feature that we currently offer for a price, it probably actually grow / improve the ecosystem and it would probably be welcomed, letting us focus on other things our customers want. People maintaining extensions or feature for our product would likely be friends. Of course you can't just dump some code and go away, that's not sustainable.
> Plus, these kinds of businesses generally only scale to mom and pop store or maybe 100 consultants.
That may be true. My company reached 60 people this year. Nextcloud is around 100. But not everyone wants to become too big. There are a lot of advantages in staying small-ish. For the CEO, a big company is also not the same fun as a 50 people company.
for good software consulting revenue is not a function of how many bugs/bad UX there are- you consult on setup, integration,maintenance,etc. If the software improves the need for this does not disappear.
If you communicate clearly what the proprietary parts of the software are, it also shouldnt be an issue. If someone wants to implement and especially maintain and test them themselves without paying, they are free to fork and do that.
It works because companies are actually willing to pay a few bucks for some convenience and support.
Income is mostly from support and consulting. These two things still pretty much rely on the actively developed product, so a big part of the company is dedicated to this. I'd say we are both a software and service company. I believe this is one nice way of developing open source software.
No insult taken :-)
The problem you have is that the barrier to entry for a competitor is zero. Equally the costs for a competitor are always lower than yours.
As long as you are small and niche, it's OK. But if you "prove the market" you basically allow company-B to do what you do, literally exactly what you do, but without the development overhead. Indeed company-B will likely be founded by an ex-employee of your company.
Let's say you charge $100 for support. $50 goes to the support tech, $50 to the development team. Sooner or later a support technician figures out he can charge $75 per hour, and keep it all.
Equally because you currently charge only for services, not licenses, the day support stops coming in is the day the company closes. There's no reoccurring income, so the developers are the first to go.
Clearly the model -does- work, especially when the project is new and things are moving fast. But it's hard to grow.
Naturally there needs to be some incentive to keep the support staff in-house. Hence various non-Open-Source tweaks to the license to try and take other companies from taking over your turf.
Deliberately incurring a high fixed overhead (product development) in a well-understood business model where profitability is highly dependent on minimizing fixed costs is creating the conditions for failure. To make this work you can no longer survive by being merely average at executing the revenue side, you have to be exceptional at the revenue side and most people are not exceptional.
Success in this model requires two separate miracles instead of one. Good startup opportunities are single miracle companies, and you focus all of your attention on creating that miracle. Companies that require two miracles to be successful are poor investments because you now have to solve two hard problems that split focus.
The thing is that support services aren't scalable. Many software businesses want a scalable source of revenue, that's why they go for cloud services.
They don't want to compete with copy cats, though, because they want monopoly-level margins.
Then they complain that Open Source won't let them have those astounding margins.
This is not an issue with Open Source licenses.
We also have this.
> just that Open Source was not designed with your employer use case in mind
Yep. Free software was designed with user rights in mind. Open source was then designed to sell the idea of free software to companies, removing the "user rights" parts, which sounded frightening to businesses, focusing on the development model, targeting developers and not users. Free software is defined with the famous 4 rules, open source is based on the open source manifesto, basically a copy of the Debian Free Software Guideline (from the Debian project, which, coincidentally, was closer to the Free Software Spirit at the time, probably still is). They are both about the same set of software and licenses, for the most part.
There's nothing in those texts / philosophies about doing business, for or against (only that free software was explicitly designed to allow selling software, because why not - and at the time, to distribute software, you probably had to copy it to floppy disks and give them, so you had some copy cost to absorb). It's indeed up to businesses to figure out the business model around FLOSS.
But that's true of many things, isn't it?
You choose open source or you don't. Either way is fine. Just take responsibility for your decision.
It's simple, really. I don't understand why so many business owners complain so much that open source doesn't protect their business... It's not meant for that.
