I’m Adam Jacob (the quoted person in Matt’s article). Happy to answer questions :)
What’s your take on the state of “run your own service, beat out the cloud providers”? Is there something particular you’d taken away from Chef “vs” AWS’s OpsWorks?
The article waves this away a little too much for me:
> Could someone take that upstream and create a competitive downstream competitor? Of course. But no one should be able to out-Yugabyte on their home turf.
> Or take Redis Labs. The company has fiddled with licensing over the last few years...
Having AWS, Azure, or GCP validate your technology, product, and market is a huge win. Being the prime creator of the product puts you in a very advantageous position (new features, deep support, better user experience). Like the “normal” open source channel, you don’t collect all of the funnel. You do get a new channel (users of rival cloud providers) that operates at a disadvantage compared to your offering (at all but scale, and that’s not an impenetrable one). Those are well qualified users, accustomed to paying for the software. They’re great leads.
Downstream competitors are net good for you. Yes, it means other people get some of the revenue. But some of those would never have used the software in the first place without that competitor, or wouldn’t be used to paying for it. The increase in usage more than makes up for it.
Each of Elastic, Redis (Labs) and Mongo (and many others) have put licenses in place to explicitly exclude people from taking their code and turn it into a service.
I think that’s fine and their right, as much as making any propriety software (including source available) is someone’s option. But you seem to have a different view about upstream (fully open?) and downstream (scarcity) that I wanted to understand more clearly.
I think they should’ve stayed/become open source, and instead used their trademark, distribution, and terms of service to ensure a brand monopoly, a-la RHEL.
You can read more about how I came to this conclusion at http://SFOSC.org
It’s absolutely their right to do. :)
And yes, I think you're on to something. "True" open source is about building communities rather than a strategy to sell proprietary software.