Hacker News Reader

Comment by LifeQuestioner | Hacker News Reader

Can someone please explain the open-source yet earning? Is it that part of the project is open source and the rest is paid and closed source? How to protect products if they're open source?

View on HN

We give away most of our[0] content free but charge for membership to access PRO content. We also don't DRM or even try that hard to prevent theft. There are some "bad actors", but we keep growing MRR at a rate that is working for us.

Helpful, honest, and generous as a business model can be very effective!

[0] https://egghead.io

From TFA: "My second idea was to move to an open core model: hold back more complex or enterprise-specific features from the OSS version, sell those features as an "expansion pack" on top of Sidekiq. Thus, Sidekiq Pro was born. This proved to be popular and forms my business today."

http://sidekiq.org/products/pro

http://sidekiq.org/products/enterprise

Correct, sidekiq is open source by default. The pro portion of the code base is closed source. Sidekiq is one almost a must have for any Rails app. I'd imagine some people just want to support him and pay the licensing fee. It reminds me of how people were willing to pay for Pivotal Tracker when it was free.

https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/wiki/Commercial-collabora...

I try to start similar dual-licensing model for my project. But I don't get this. The link page and "In order to unambiguously own and sell Sidekiq commercial products, I must have the copyright associated with the entire codebase. Any code you create which is merged must be owned by me. That's not me trying to be a jerk, that's just the way it works." - it has no legal value. I think all contributions are also LGPL unless contributor gives a consent to give up the change as commercial or public domain etc. In my opinion if Sidekiq Pro is forked from Sidekiq then Pro code should be released under LGPL or he should share part of $80k/monthly with all contributors. What about previous contributors' rights when the project switched to LGPL or dual? Can somebody explain this scheme?

Changes contributed to Sidekiq are LGPL. Changes contributed to Sidekiq Pro must also assign rights for those changes to me so I can sell them. I do have customers who have access to the Sidekiq Pro source code and send me pull requests when they find bugs or enhancements.

Core is open, paid product extends the core, and you access via a private gem server. You have the code at that point, and it's not DRM'ed or encrypted or anything. Nothing to keep you from running it after your subscription stops. Some features, like unique jobs, are covered by other open source extensions to Sidekiq - Mike happily lists those projects inside of Sidekiq's wiki. Much of this openness seems counterintuitive, but it's obviously worked out very well.

Not being of the Ruby world, I did not understand what his licensing method would entail. Amazingly simple, yet profitable. I guess the fear of missing out is what keeps the annual subscriptions re-upped.

I'd say a big part of it is that most of the subscribers have a business to run, and it's generally good practice to stay legal. Besides, if it's working and worth the price, you keep paying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com