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Comment by julianmarq | Hacker News Reader

> The ideology is still in our blood and we keep the open source circle of life running.

I'm curious about what exactly you mean by these two sentences. Particularly the second one.

Is this circle you speak of the one where a company announces an open source product and once the goodwill—that open source development gives it—ensures a number of contributors and early adopters, helping the project grow until the company thinks it's good enough to monetize, at such point they close it down and start charging everyone; then they start a new open source product with the extra money, rinse and repeat?

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I hope this does not sound cynical. When we release a new open source project, we are not sure what the project will turn into. We put it out, hoping to get some reaction from the world. If there is no reaction, we will only invest a bare minimum for our own use. When there is some reaction, the community might find its sweet spot. When there is huge enthusiasm, which is the least likely, we might decide to seek ways to invest more and get our returns.

Keep in mind that for projects like that, even if they are open source, the vast majority of contributions come from the primary investor. And other contributors can always fork.

It is not anything special about open source. For any product, early adopters are almost expected to get hurt or lose interest as the product matures. It's a part of the product's life cycle that's in any startup book. Crossing the chasm is hard not only for the business but also for the original user base. Yet, successful businesses are destined to do it. I am sorry for the ones that become dissappointed, but they too get something out of it along the ride.

So the answer to my question was "yes" then, thank you. I don't know what I would call that practice but it is not any kind of "open source circle of life".

> It's a part of the product's life cycle that's in any startup book.

There are many start-ups truly committed to open source development. Conversely, there are many who are not but are pretty upfront and honest about how they are not. I don't judge either one as I'd rather not be a zealot, and one ought to do what one ought to do.

However, there are also some companies (thankfully a minority, as far as I can tell) who are not really committed whatsoever to open source, but still pretend to be (often using marketing speak like "the ideology is in our blood") for the sake of good publicity. Those I don't like, but then again most of them are large corporations, so it's not like there's much one can do in that area.

It's a predatory tactic, and it works. Like in nature, being ruthless and cynical in software development pays off. The rest is ornamental bloviation.

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