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Comment by chaostheory | Hacker News Reader

I see nothing wrong with him providing a free community version and a paid custom enterprise versions.

Me neither, but telling others that they will have a bad time trying to do the same is either confusing or disingenuous depending on how charitable you want to be. His second comment seems to indicate having regrets in going that way presumably because this strategy turned out to not be very profitable, and that was the reconciliation I was looking for, sort of. I still disagree with the original bullet points.

> they will have a bad time trying to do the same is either confusing or disingenuous depending on how charitable you want to be.

How? For me the interpretation is straightforward: if you create OSS in the hopes of making money from it, you might succeed but the odds are overwhelmingly against you.

Ultimately, the only success guaranteed when you open source a piece of code is the fact that you... Open sourced a piece of code. There's now a new library/tool/application out in the world for everyone to see.

That's how I interpreted the other comment, and I wasn't even too charitable.

Even if you launch a startup you have the odds heavily stacked against you making money. That's just the nature of such variable return endeavours and has nothing to do with OSS.

In my sibling comments I explained more about disagreeing with the starving artist vs business enterprise false dichotomy.

I don’t see anything wrong with that either. Most successful startup founders tell people that startups are hard.

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