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Comment by spotman | Hacker News Reader

With all the kerfuffle, I would not have imagined it would be so easy to replace.

So, after poking around, it looks like pageflow is the actual creators of this stuff, and scrollytelling, has built a business around supporting it and hosting it?

While concurrently, it appears pageflow can also be paid to support and host their own product?

Weirdly, pageflow appears cheaper too!

Am I missing something? Would this be equivalent of someone opening up a competitor to wordpress.com, powered by wordpress?

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There was quite a common scam a while ago about selling open office.

It actually was completely legal because they were (in the fine print) selling support - the software was free, of course.

A lot of bigger companies sell support for OSS products they don't build. This can be legitimate. It just depends on how forthright you are with who built what.

They don't have to sell support. One is allowed to sell open-source software. (One of course has to comply with any relevant license requirements when distributing).

Right. Copyleft licenses (the GPL and the like) only require you keep software free as in freedom, not as in beer. You can sell the software just fine, so long as you provide the source.

And non-copyleft licenses let you do whatever you want. You can take non-copyleft open-source software, add your proprietary junk and sell it at a killing, if you want. You don't even have to provide the source.

You sound like selling an open source software someone else made is inappropriate. Apparently nothing is wrong with that as long as the license is applied.

What's inappropriate here is he did not allow his clients to redistribute and modify the source even though his work is based largely on an open source project.

It is inappropriate to imply that the value you provide is both development and support, when you only provide support.

Especially in a consumer context, where support is usually a small fraction of the cost.

I work for an organization that actually purchases a hosted product that fits this exact description literally. Can't stop laughing. :)

It's a common business model and there are loads of companies that offer WordPress hosting with various management services to compete with WordPress.com

Companies take open source software and package up management, hosting, and consulting services. That's basically what Red Hat does, for example.

This isn't a good example - WordPress.com doesn't offer the same product as other WordPress hosts. With the latter, you're still getting "self-hosted" WordPress, but with the former, you're getting one install added to their giant multi-site installation (and all the limitations that that imposes).

That's not true actually, the software that powers wordpress.com is builtin and can power many sites from the same instance.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network

So while many hosters will offer a single instance (as it's more flexible), some, often companies doing it internally will use multisite just like wordpress.com.

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