Comment by rubenfiszel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubenfiszel | Hacker News Reader

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Congrats on the series B and very interesting approach with the Views.

Developer tools, especially ones around code should be open-source. If you like the idea of productionizing one-off scripts, building flows, and managing secrets and schedules in an integrated platform, we have made the same observation as the Airplane team but in a fully open-source manner: [1]. Being open-source in this space offers a lot of synergies, you can for instance build a community around sharing the modules that compose your flows: [2]

In addition, if your primary languages are Typescript, Python or Go, we offer a more integrated experience by parsing the script parameters directly to generate the input spec and the frontend. We are developing our own UI builder as well, more to be announced in the next month. We just released our helm-charts for easier self-hosted deployments: [4]

You can also try it for free at [5]

[1]: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill

[2]: https://hub.windmill.dev

[3]: https://windmill.dev

[4]: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill-helm-charts

[5]: https://app.windmill.dev

Why do we glorify raising money instead of congratulating companies for successful, profitable business models?

There is no way that I would depend on a closed source solution from a company with no proven business model.

Let me take that back. When I was a dev lead where our company made up 60% of our vendors revenue, we refused to sign a contract with them until they agreed to put their code in escrow and under certain conditions we had a right to their code.

Did they agree to that?

Yes.

Putting the code in escrow with a third party like Iron Mountain doesn’t give you access to the code unless the company folds or the product is discontinued.

I’ve been on the other side at another company where we were forced to put our own code in escrow by a large customer. I suggested we do the same for this vendor to our director he had the lawyers do everything else.

In fact when I was on the other side, our company did go out of business (got acquired for scraps), the escrow conditions were triggered, I was laid off as soon as we got acquired and went to work for the customer as a decently paid contractor.

> Developer tools, especially ones around code should be open-source.

I don't agree. I want the freedom to choose what tools I use, and what their development/profit models are.

Open-source does not mean we do not have a sustainable business model. We offer enterprise license for specific plugins and hosted solutions as well. The difference is that you can read our code, audit it and self-host the full platform with less frictions. Kafka and Airflow are also open-source but the commercial company backing them are thriving. Plus if we were to disappear, the project would continue to go forward.

How would the product go forward?

By what definition is a company “thriving” that is losing money?

Confluent (Kafka)

https://siliconangle.com/2022/08/03/confluent-reports-strong...

> The company reported a loss before certain costs such as stock compensation of 16 cents per share, with revenue coming to $139.4 million in the quarter, growing 58% from a year earlier. That resulted in a net loss of $117.6 million for the quarter.

The company behind AirFlow is AirBnB. Yes it’s “thriving”. But not based on AirFlow.

Or you know, this little company called astronomer https://www.astronomer.io ...

Isn’t that “just” a hosted version of Airflow? If it is, that’s a different value proposition/risk assessment. If Astronomer goes out of business, you just take your code and host it somewhere else.

Or is that exactly the point you are making?

We are open-source so yes, that is the point that I am making. We offer a hosted version of Windmill and plugins but the core will live-on forever.

Does Airplane do Windmill, but closed source?

At a high-level, yes - the "scripts to apps / workflwos" tagline that Windmill advertises on their homepage is something Airplane does as well. That was what we initially launched with about a year ago. We also now support the ability to create more complex UIs in Airplane as well.

So for example, if you wanted to create an admin panel / customer dashboard at your company that has the following functionality, you could do all of this in Airplane:

* Display customer data that's retrieved from a SQL query or REST endpoint

* Allow users to select customers and view more details about their usage

* Have a button next to each customer that says "delete customer" which kicks off a Python script that deletes that customer's data

To give them credits, Airplane was first. But we have very different ambitions imho. We have open-sourced our flow spec: https://openflow.dev and have a larger vision of becoming a standard for orchestration as established as Airflow or Temporal but simplified and principled, which is completely out-of-scope for a proprietary product.

Agreed. We exclusively use the Frappe Framework along with ERPNext and it works great for this same use case.

Based on your pricing page, those helm charts cost "call us" money to use. Am I reading that right?

It's AGPL. If you do not need any enterprise feature like SSO, you do not need to "call us", it's free. But if you fork it and re-expose it to users, you will need to make your fork open-source.

Our business model is that we are the only ones that can grant a commercial license because we hold the copyright and we provide plugins that only make sense at the enterprise scale such as SSO and exportable audit logs.

So in a sense, if you are an enterprise and need to pay us, what is the difference ? Well you can audit the code and experiment with it prior to deciding if you'd like to pursue with us, and not have to go through a salesy pitch to self-host and stress-test our orchestration runtime.

The entire idea of “call us” about pricing screams of something you see from Oracle. That’s not a compliment by the way.

I do not know if your commented was targeted at Windmill or Airplane but our pricing is very clear and upfront. It's 10$/mo/user for the premium hosted version. You can read the code, use and self-host the product freely and without our blessing. The enterprise contract is a call us because that's how enterprise contracts work, they need complex agreement with various clauses.

I was basing my comment on the comment that you replied to:

> Based on your pricing page, those helm charts cost "call us" money to use. Am I reading that right?

I couldn’t tell from your reply whether you were explicitly correcting him.

But it’s clear now, that I made a bad assumption about your pricing.

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