CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it.
Do people here have examples of companies that are taking innovative approaches to the licensing/OSS question?
Managing your own PostgreSQL with HA and replication is a ton of work. And for many small to medium sized companies, using a hosted service makes sense.
But open source has a problem today, there is a huge lack of contribution in some projects. The older the project is, the more it seems to struggle.
Almost exclusively designed to deal with the issue described in the article, of preventing public clouds from running this as a service.
They also published another article about how to make money as an open-source company: https://blog.timescale.com/how-open-source-software-makes-mo...
One big part of our business now is licensing Native SDK connectors/libs. For example, secure authentication that utilizes biometric auth and keystore/keychain functionality. Those aren't open source but any serious enterprise needs that if they are building an app with the open source Ionic Framework, and our target developer has no interest in writing native code to do this themselves. This is also interesting because enterprises are actively wanting us to build, support, and license out key client-side functionality for their apps.
That alignment of free for the community with addons that only make sense for the enterprise has worked well for us so far and I believe the frontend focus keeps us far enough away from the "hosted OSS" problem described here for Mongo.
Red Hat did a smart thing and used their open source offerings to deliver business value outside of the product space. It's an approach that most other successful OSS companies seem to have have followed.
Support is something enterprise customers want, and they will sign yearly contracts to get it. In return, if/when they have a production issue, 0-day vulnerability, etc, they have someone to contact (or may have contacted them!) to help them resolve the issue. And Red Hat has experts in both support and engineering, meaning resolution can be anything from a config change to a rapidly released patch. Happy customers renew year after year.
I work for Red Hat Consulting. This is a very different beast, consulting involves selling lots of short to medium term projects with the occasional long project, then trying to optimally staff those projects. You only get revenue while consultants are on the ground. It's not surprising to me that an open source company that relies only on consulting wouldn't be sustainable.
Rather they create enterprise distributions that are made up of a number of open source projects that are (ideally) integrated into a solution. This combined with the right investment in support and training provides a product that is more compelling than "we provide a signed version of $UPSTREAM_PROJECT". I would say OEL is successful for the amount Oracle appear to invest in it (not much).
Timing helps a lot too though, in that they had a lot of success before the advent of the public cloud so are in a better position to weather the storm while they figure out a new model.
https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/pricing/
But with it you generally get very quick responses to issues, and if your bill is enough, you get a technical account manager who gets paged when you open a ticket. They handle many things, but I believe AWS Linux is in that list of many.
Having the Technical Account Manager is quite valuable.
Then again the reverse is also true. Just look at all the software providing an S3 compatible API.
They are selling services and the fact that you have to understand a lot of their tech before you can even contribute (let alone "steal") help a lot.
Google keeps control by holding on to the best implementation of services, as well as controlling the ecosystem with developer services.
Amazon has shown that Android is still an open platform but the work involved to overthrow Google would be a massive undertaking.