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Comment by noen | Hacker News Reader

The whole article paints a picture of Microsoft eating OSS OSS projects, but the author begins by clearly stating that the project he is going to reference (Octopus Deploy) is not OSS.

Instead, he is complaining that Microsoft is competing with his own proprietary, commercial offering. I'm not sure why he keeps pushing the narrative that this is bad for OSS, when the only two projects mentioned aren't.

Full Disclosure - I worked in the Azure DevOps org for a long time, and several of his assertions about Microsoft's auto-defacto status for developer tools and services aren't true, or at least weren't true during the time this article was set in (2010-2015).

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> While Octopus isn't OSS (though much of it is)

I lost interest in the author’s argument at that point. They’re upset because someone is going to give a better offer than half a mil a year for the same product. And they’re saying, “think of the OSS!” The same OSS they’re exploiting to charge half a mil. How much of that money does the OSS see? Do they get proper support and maintenance?

Azure is a formidable competitor but a slow moving beast. They should be well geared towards innovation and not depending on their... yes... half a mil price tier. The fact that’s written on paper and not a dedicated sales/VP call is crazy.

It sounds like they need to find something unique. Since every cloud provider is moving this direction.

Well, I at least applaud them for actually writing the price out. I hate calling the sales team to find out a price. In fact, I never do that unless no alternatives with listed prices exist.

Err, free software does not mean "zero dollars."

They're not exploiting the model to charge money for it.

I know Octopus Deploy uses proprietary code.

But if you're going to complain about the model, at least know what the model is. It's not about the amount of money you must pay to obtain a copy.

> Err, free software does not mean "zero dollars."

That's why they asked "How much of that money does the OSS see?"

If it's getting a significant chunk, then things are great.

If all the money is going to the proprietary part, then they have no high ground over Microsoft.

Nobody is complaining about money charged for OSS support and development.

Ehhh....

- Octopus Deploy, for the record, is awesome. But it became extremely overpriced in 2018, to the point I wouldn't reccomend it.

- OTOH, I will point out that since the various Release management bits were tossed out by Microsoft, it seems like that's around when FAKE's deployment module started getting ignored. For Ref, FAKE is an OSS Build tool (like MAKE but F# DSL). It used to have a pretty slick remote deployment module, but around 2016-2017 or so they decided there were too many other options out there to be worth continuing development on.

Their pricing is indeed extremely overpriced, particularly their self-hosted pricing.

10 targets - free

25 targets - $2300/year

50 targets - $4500/year

100 targets - $8800/year

200 targets - $16800/year

400 targets - $32000/year

500 targets - $39000/year

5000 targets - $290000/year

inf targets - $420000/year

https://octopus.com/pricing/overview

That's, erm, aggressive.

Luckily, all of our "targets" are moving toward Lambda and Fargate (serverless Docker). We just have it to run CloudFormation templates for deployments. That pricing is ridiculous. I never realized it was that bad.

On another note, Azure Devops has excellent support for AWS. It's better than Amazon's native solutions.

It wasn't always so bad, they really screwed over their customer base by jacking up the price on those who already had bought in. I worked at a place where we had picked Octo and we ended up regretting it.

I wonder if they're feeling the pinch from docker/ansible and other automation tools. Their customer base is probably more likely to jump to these sort of platforms and the rest of the .net world seems to have no concept of automated deployment and if they do it's from some sort of publish wizard in Visual Studio.

Yep my firm has over 900 targets and our bill went from around $4,000/year to almost $100,000/year. We’ve remained sped up our transition to K8s (long time coming and a silver lining)

If you license Siemens products, they do this to you roughly three times per year.

The article is a response to the the blog post "The Next Decade of .NET Open Source", which is linked in the first para, and the author is stating that they have a similar experience despite being a business.

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