Hacker News Reader

> until more people actually get adequately paid for making open-source, open core should not only be tolerated but encouraged

Come on, did you actually read the article or skim the first paragraphs?

The authors point is that open core is not a model that enables small time developers to fund their projects.

…it’s a deceptive, deliberate marketing strategy funded by venture capital to run a loss leader and capture market share, then bait-and-switch to a cloud hosted product.

It’s been shown to be successful, and new companies are cynically adopting it as “free marketing”.

Even when the initial ideals are honest, the model is fundamentally incompatible with running a for-profit enterprise due to obvious (and explicitly pointed out in the article) misaligned incentives.

Don’t encourage it. It’s deceitful. If you’re doing it, you’re being a dick. :(

Being honest from the beginning as per the examples at the end of the article are what we should encourage.

The author almost unravels their own argument at the end:

> I just believe that more businesses can find ways to make open source contributions core to their business, without resorting to the typical open core strategy. There’s a lot of nuance in creating better aligned incentives.

Their problem really is just with _this particular behavioral pattern of VC-raising startups whose software is open-core_, which is why they criticize "The Open Core Strategy". They are not against open-core in itself, just that it is incompatible with the profit incentives these companies have, where it quite literally turns into calculating ROI for "how many new users will see this new feature in the Core product and then be converted into paid users within 6 months".

Also, based only off of the description for shipyard they mention here, it sounds like you either can't execute low code templates offline, or can't fork the project without recreating both the UI and the execution logic, both of which seem to violate the spirit of free software.

>Their problem really is just with _this particular behavioral pattern of VC-raising startups whose software is open-core_, which is why they criticize "The Open Core Strategy". They are not against open-core in itself, just that it is incompatible with the profit incentives these companies have

100%. I want more people to figure out ways to make open source work with the business model. Typical open core tends to end up in a situation where you're serving two masters, but one pays you. Which one would you rather work for?

>it sounds like you either can't execute low code templates offline, or can't fork the project without recreating both the UI and the execution logic, both of which seem to violate the spirit of free software.

Must have been poorly worded then. Our low-code templates are just visual wrappers around Python CLIs that contain no proprietary platform logic. You don't need our UI to run them locally.

I fear the end game of a fully propieatary software world is that the only real way people interact with computers is app stores, programming is not something people can learn online anymore (but it used to). not even command line, just app stores. the new "hello world" in this dystopia is "go to app store, buy hello world the app, done".

Is it better to keep everything proprietary?

People exist who do open source for a living outside the open core bubble. Take a listen to this video [0] from Paul Ramsey who has built a successful career working on PostGIS (database for geospatial information). It covers his thoughts on the future of open source (spoiler: its not open core).

[0] http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2019/05/foss4g-keynote-2019.ht...

TLDR?

Attempt at a summary (a very good talk!): 1. Open source produces immense value and ironically locks itself out of capturing the value. In the last 20 years, open source has become the oxygen of software development. Cloud providers do what proprietary software vendors did 20 years ago.

2. "IP is free, support for $$" like Red hat is a viable business model but captures only a very small part of the overall value. The much larger part is captured by private sector selling SaaS, Cloud infra vendors. Software has become a commodity, it is user-facing services that capture value today.

3. The value capturing works fine for the companies but little to nothing of that value flows back to the people who write or maintain the software. This needs to be overcome. Openness is important but we need to value it, and governments as biggest buyers of services play a role. If we valued openness more consequently, it would lead to more opportunities for open source developers to capture value by offering user-facing services.

I don't see any alternatives to open core there(?). Points 1 and 3 just mention the usual problems with OSS, not solutions.

> "IP is free, support for $$" like Red hat is a viable business model but captures only a very small part of the overall value. The much larger part is captured by private sector selling SaaS, Cloud infra vendors.

Isn't this the value captured by open core? Support is only part of premium services, while companies are free to choose any additional revenue stream (SaaS, extensions, integrations, etc.).

I also think that the talk can be seen as suggesting that open core is the preferable way to make a living from OSS - as long as openness is preserved (service implementations can be exchanged, client can pull out their data etc).

My interpretation of why the talk was mentioned as an argument contra open core: - the talk does have criticism for value extraction that does not preserve openness (as the OP says: promises of interop etc are not kept, lock-in... is it really meaningfully "open"?), and that it is not necessarily sustainable or fair for OSS developers ("who pays the postgres committers"). This latter point certainly gets more nuanced for open core, but can still be relevant e.g. when you depend on some library you are interested in its being maintained, having security vulnerabilities identified and patched etc.

The story the essay paints is that for "open core" to be profitable, eventually the company will have to make the "free" version basically unattractive compared to the paid one. It is described as basically a "freemium" model.

So what is the difference between this and if it just weren't open source at all? I see the marketing benefit to the producers of having people consider it "open source", even though eventually they'll be locked in and have to pay for the value they want.

What is the benefit to the consumer? Real question. I'm not certain there is none. Perhaps the open core being truly open source, at least other developers can look at that code as a learning resource, or even fork it into something else? (Note that requires it being really open source, that is legally forkable under a really open source license that will allow it to achieve a life of it's own. Entities trying to do "open core" where the core is licensed under a non-OSI-approved license... we could talk about that). I could be persuaded that makes it better than if it were just proprietary license altogether? Anything else?

> Open core is the only way to really monetize open-source software.

Red Hat has built a business on free software without resorting to open core. Why can't anyone else (according to you)?

Kitware has as well. The vast majority of the work done is open. There are, however, customer-specific builds for some things, but typically only "special sauce" stuff is specific to those builds and is much closer to "customer purchased development of a specific plugin" than anything like open core.

FD: Kitware employee