Why Open Core Is Dead

thenewstack.io

18 points·shimont··4 comments

The first point covered, giving away your core IP, is definitely one that resonates with me. We went open core with our headless document management system (https://github.com/formkiq/formkiq-core), and there is always a worry in the back of my mind that we are providing such a solid foundation with the open core/source components that we may be undercutting our enterprise modules.

But on the other hand, I don't know that we're popular enough for someone to come along and build free modules on top of our product. So maybe this isn't a problem we'd need to worry about.

Until it is... ??

Yep. The trouble is the butterfly effect here can be overwhelming. Open-source has always been a one-way door, and now the price of getting it wrong have increased. But it's not too hard to get it right, that's why I'm suggesting the open-foundation framework here

I don't understand this "open foundation" idea. Spinnaker isn't adding subscribers for Netflix, Kubernetes isn't driving that many customers to Google Cloud, and React doesn't increase Facebook usage. And those open source projects were created long after the parent companies were already successful.

There's a reason why there are two lists of different company sizes.

K8S and general cloud migration grows the overall cloud market, and Google-Cloud benefits from it a lot.

For all companies these projects help with building communities and recruiting, which is a top priority for such companies.

But the most important point is that an alternative to open-core is needed, and open-foundation has all the mechanics to fill in the gap.

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