Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

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> 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?

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