Comment by ahepp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahepp | Hacker News Reader

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The author is the CEO of one of the companies they say has the solution to this "problem". I guess they technically say that in a footnote, but it's pretty far below the fold.

How can you criticize hosted cloud services for maybe not being open source enough, but then suggest closed source services with an open source interface as somehow being a better alternative?

How can you criticize dual licensing, but then suggest "source available" as an alternative?

> Saying that “Open Source = Good, Proprietary = Bad” is too simplistic. Adopting this mentality leads to businesses that take advantage of unsuspecting victims.

I agree wholeheartedly with the first sentence! But I don't think the author provided any convincing examples to support the claim that open core businesses are somehow taking advantage of users. Yeah, users should be careful not to unintentionally lock themselves into a SaaS that is _technically_ open source. Hard for me to see how _any_ of the author's proposed alternatives are better in that regard.

Just want to clarify - I do not think we have the solution to this problem nor do I claim that cloud services are not open source enough. Rather, I decided to take one (of many) possible avenues that I believe is more upfront and honest about our relationship with open source that directly aligns with our business incentives.

The difference to me is honesty and intent from the outset. Open core companies tend to lean into "we'll figure out how to monetize later" which inherently means it's harder to trust what they say now because their incentives are guaranteed to shift towards monetization eventually. The other models bake in monetization from the start, so you know what you're getting into when you start using the product.

> Open core companies tend to lean into "we'll figure out how to monetize later" which inherently means it's harder to trust what they say now because their incentives are guaranteed to shift towards monetization eventually.

How is this guaranteed? If the OSS product is truly core to the business, the incentive will always be to make it as best as possible, which will benefit both OSS users and commercial customers.

This "shift towards monetization" either doesn't happen, or if it does, has no negative effect for OSS users, who will only benefit from the company having more resources to invest in growing the team, more frequent updates, better support, etc.

I can name countless products that have done this right, yet can't think of any that haven't. Can you mention some? Your article lists a few along with their funding data, as if this is somehow inherently a bad thing.

Chances are that companies that did this wrongly had much larger problems, and took advantage of their users in other ways as well. This isn't an issue with the open core model, but with these companies.

> The other models bake in monetization from the start, so you know what you're getting into when you start using the product.

The thing is that none of the alternatives you propose have any benefits for the user. They're either not free software (source available), the OSS component is not standalone and is intrinsically tied to a proprietary service, which serves more like a commercial hook, or the OSS components are noncritical to the business, which doesn't incentivize maintenance.

This is a very opportunistic view of OSS, and is no better than companies that do open core wrongly.

> I can name countless products that have done this right, yet can't think of any that haven't. Can you mention some? Your article lists a few along with their funding data, as if this is somehow inherently a bad thing.

Elsewhere in the thread there are a couple examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35026270

I think part of the problem is that once you rely on premium tier features like LDAP, you're hooked and now the fact that it's open core has about zero relevance to you.

Although it still has some relevance. A child comment on that link I posted talks about going back to the open core by using an oauth workaround for LDAP. So it does seem like the open core might be worth something.

Nagware and price gouging are not problems exclusive to the open core model, though, so it's unfair to criticize it as being responsible for this. Especially when the proposed alternatives in the article offer much less benefits to the user.

> I think part of the problem is that once you rely on premium tier features like LDAP, you're hooked and now the fact that it's open core has about zero relevance to you.

For a product like Mattermost, I can see how LDAP is a premium tier feature. If you're using OSS products in an enterprise environment, you can surely afford to support its development, so I don't see how you're on the hook in any way. Your support is making the software available to users who don't need or can't afford these features, which is a net positive. Besides, it gives you the freedoms to modify the software in any way that suits you, which you wouldn't get by paying for a proprietary product. If a certain feature is so important to you, and you refuse to pay the original developers for it, you can always choose to develop it internally for yourself, as that user's company did.

After thinking some more, if what you're saying mostly boils down to "there are serious issues with open core cloud offerings" then I agree.

I work on embedded products, so for my purposes open core usually means "you're getting free beer, but you might not get free updates". We've also paid for commercial licenses of dual-licensed projects and I think that model works pretty well.

Once we're talking about services, if you're not willing or able to operate the service yourself (at the scale you need...) then the open core seems pretty useless as a check on the company's ability to squeeze you for more cash.

On the other hand, it doesn't seem to me like explicitly commercial services solve those problems. Just because a closed source service has a pricing model I accept as fair today, doesn't mean it will tomorrow. But I guess there's something to be said that there was never any pretense otherwise.

>Once we're talking about services, if you're not willing or able to operate the service yourself (at the scale you need...) then the open core seems pretty useless as a check on the company's ability to squeeze you for more cash.

But if you aren't willing, then the service provides value and if you aren't able to, then there is the conflict of interest in that the opencore company might sabotage scaling the opensource version but if we ignore that possibility (after all, you should simply avoid the product, if the opensource version is inferior) then you are again paying for the value of someone else taking care of your problems.

Calling this "squeezing" is strange.

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