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Comment by ununoctium87 | Hacker News Reader

RedHat?

My impression is that RedHat is basically the only company to pull off the open source + paid support model. All other open source companies I know of either use open core or paid hosting.

Are there are any other companies like RedHat successfully thriving off just paid support? If so which ones? If not why not?

PostgreSQL has a number of companies providing support, the db is free and open source. Ray is offered for free, Anyscale provides support. Quansight offers qhub for free and provides support. Those are just a few off the top of my head. Disclaimer: I work at Quansight and contribute to ray.

Anyscale seems to follow the paid hosting (open source product + paid in-house SaaS offering) strategy though? Similarly the majority of the companies listed at https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/ either provide paid hosting or some version of open core (proprietary add-ons/tools) in addition to support, or else seem to be general DB consultancies that include Postgres as one of their supported products, although it does look like there are a few small teams that focus exclusively on Postgres consulting.

Quansight is a fascinating example! Are you allowed to share roughly what ratio of revenue comes from the support side and what ratio comes from the venture fund?

I don’t really know, sorry. There are a lot of moving pieces as the company grows (we are hiring) and the interplay between the pure consulting, open source work, growing the Venture fund is dynamic.

What's wrong with paid hosting? For the people who do pay for software (essentially commercial entities), the management and support are as important (if not more) than the software itself. The code being open-source is actually a great advantage because it alleviates concerns around lock-in and vendor going under (If e.g. AWS's RDS is for some reason no longer available to us, I can still run Postgresql myself, at least until I find an alternative).

> What's wrong with paid hosting?

Oh nothing wrong. I'm just on a fact-finding mission on seeing whether any other companies have successfully followed the consulting/support contract model vs paid hosting or open core (because this has rather significant repercussions on what kind of products lend themselves well to a given business model, e.g. a desktop app is not going to work well for paid hosting).

SUSE is another one I'm aware of. Some projects also fund themselves off support, I believe cURL does it.

The curl guy has joined a company. https://curl.se/support.html

Right I totally forgot about SUSE.

But I'm not really counting cURL because that's just one person right? The challenges faced by essentially a 1-person freelancer are quite different than a larger company. Or is cURL now a whole company at this point? EDIT: I see you mean this as a separate category of just "projects."

Arguably that's mostly cuz SAP strongly recommends SuSE

Never seen a real use case for it outside of the ERP arena, and RHEL / CentOS can do everything else.

Ubuntu / Canonical is trying but heard the company is kind of a mess.

Proxmox projects (Proxmox VE, Proxmox Backup, Proxmox Mail Gateway) are also 100% fully open source and gets the revenue through enterprise support. Works fine for us.

>Works fine for us.

Because proxmox makes phenomenal products.

The thing is if you do pull off the open source + paid support model where does that leave you? Doing technical support? I suspect most of us would prefer to spend our time creating rather than answering emails and phone calls.

It feels like we have the cart before the horse, we start by deciding we want to do open source then try and squeeze the business model into it. We would be better starting with the business and customers then deciding whether open source helps or hinders.

Suse, EnterpriseDB, Canonical, Hashicorp and and and...but a Linux-distro for the desktop with the sustainability of two "fighting" friends......

IIRC EnterpriseDB mainly makes it money from paid hosting and I think Hashicorp makes its money from a combo of paid hosting and open core (i.e. it has other proprietary tools and add-ons). SUSE is a good example, but I'm not as sure about Canonical. Wasn't it the case that Canonical is actually operating at a loss and has been for a while? Maybe that's changed?

Canonical had a $20 million operating profit in 2020.

Oh interesting. But digging into that it looks like it's coming from adding open core and previous to that they were losing money? (Ubuntu Pro + Ubuntu Advantage providing auxiliary proprietary? tools)

But then you can argue that RedHat made also money with Openshift no?

>EnterpriseDB mainly makes it money from paid hosting

Not sure if that's true.

> But then you can argue that RedHat made also money with Openshift no?

Yeah but RedHat's (and I guess SUSE?) miracle is that they were still very profitable before Openshift.

> Not sure if that's true.

Well hopefully someone from EnterpriseDB can chime in!

My understanding is that Busybox and buildroot are largely maintained by individual consultants which is pretty similar (although there's no larger company around them.)

The company bought by IBM recently?

I mean, they got a nice chunk of change, but there's no guarantee that any of their original culture will still be in place 10 years from now.

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