Comment by holoway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by holoway | Hacker News Reader

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It’s working pretty well for everyone. OpsWorks revenue was smaller than Chef. It grew our pie. Elastic, Redis, Mongo - all far bigger businesses with AWS competitions with them, seeing big growth in their cloud businesses.

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.

Thanks for the quick response! Let me clarify though.

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 it’s inefficient, in a market sense - for the reasons I explained above. All the source available companies we mentioned did that after they got the lift from the open source channel, and the lift from a competitive service. In the case of mongo, the competitor doesn’t use any of their code (making it even more of a straight competitor, meaning it might be harder to extract AWS customers for them).

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. :)

I recently stumbled upon your book at sfosc.org via reading a post on Bryan Cantrill's blog.

And yes, I think you're on to something. "True" open source is about building communities rather than a strategy to sell proprietary software.

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