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Comment by jsiepkes | Hacker News Reader

Though Artifactory is currently still listed as being OSS on their site ( https://jfrog.com/open-source/ ) they stopped publishing the source code after the 7.0 release of Artifactory (somewhere beginning this year). I guess this could be the reason. Having an OSS product is not something investors get thrilled about...

Usually JFrog is pretty responsive on StackOverflow though for this particular question they seem a bit evasive ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43481238/where-is-the-ar... ).

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Rightly so, considering the next step for a lot of such OSS projects is AWS offering it as paid hosted service with zero benefit to the maintainers. So then they have to couple it with a restrictive license which devalues the "open" part.

> So then they have to...

Why do they have to?

To make money

Can they not compete with Amazon? The developers know the product best.

I think the real problem is that in a lot of companies, there’s a huge institutional inertia towards adding a new supplier vs. paying an existing supplier slightly more.

ElasticSearch or Redis seem like a good example of the challenges with that approach. Managing contracts is tedious and there's a substantial convenience factor for the difference between “click and it's running on your existing bill” and “go somewhere else, get setup with a license, take over O&M for your own servers”.

If it's really critical, you'll do that but a company has to be really dependent on a piece of software (or unusually cognizant of the open source maintainership problem) to go the second route. Built-in defaults carry a lot of weight.

Jfrog is available on AWS marketplace, so at least they have the same convenience even if papa Jeff still takes a cut.

Partially - the AWS Marketplace can avoid a procurement (which can be huge) but then you’re running EC2 servers. The popularity of services like RDS suggests there’s a good percentage of the market which will choose managed options, which is great for them but doesn’t help the upstream developers unless a cloud provider supports that development.

They know their product best, and Amazon knows hosting best. So competing with Amazon hosting their product is an uphill battle.

> Their proprietary license protecting their code set competitors and intentional clones back days, weeks or months ... years ago.

- benologist, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17454032

If AWS wants to copy you, not having your source code isn't going to stop them.

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