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Comment by CAP_NET_ADMIN | Hacker News Reader

OSS version didn't have official Docker images prebuilt, you had to build them yourself and for a long time the OSS build was broken. A year or two ago they promised they'll fix it or even provide official OSS image, this didn't happen.

One person finally created a working release train on github and was releasing OSS containers, Docker Hub reports it as 10k+ pulls, which is a lot for unofficial image.

I tend to stay away from any 3rd party tool that's not really a main part of infrastructure and requires sales contacts. It's wasting my company time to deal with sales when it comes to a few licenses, just give me a number input and buy button. I also lost some confidence regarding Sourcegraph, as it seems they change their direction, pricing and rules multiple times per year

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It is a good product, so we're tying to put our org in a position to pay for it. But I really don't like this model of intentionally frustrating or obfuscating whether it is open source or not, or not listing/hiding what is or isn't in enterprise vs OSS versions. For example, the fact that starting off open source (assuming you succeeded running the maze of figuring out how to run it), explicitly blocked the path to goto enterprise is a shame, and seems like a bit of a missed business opportunity.

We'll probably see more of these faux OSS projects who hoped for some community/network effect from being OSS to translate into either strong donations or considerable uptake of their enterprise/cloud/managed versions go this route.

To be clear, fully support charging for and paying for SaaS. Would just like be able to know what is in front of me when making build/buy decisions.

I've tried finding out if they still offer the free tier now that the OSS is gone, because one of their employees mentioned it on Github, but failed to find anything. I can see they have a free trial. Their own website is full of broken links and contradicting information due to the frequent licensing/product changes.

I've even found a page still mentioning the OSS version and telling you how easy it is to fire it up.

They shot themselves in the foot majorly on this one.

When you realize that one of your products isn’t being heavily used and is OSS, you don’t close source it, you keep it open!

This shows that the value add of the paid product is actually worth it to customers.

Now?

Not so much.

Yes, I remember the Docker thing, but I also remember that at least the language parsers we were interested in were only supported through some kind of plugin mechanism, which the OSS version did not support, so it was useless for us, so I didn't ever bother testing it.

So basically their "open source" offering wasn't really open source, it wasn't even open core, as you had to build it yourself, the build wasn't working for a long time and even if you managed that, some languages were enterprise-only.

Nice. How to get free marketing by strapping Open Source to your product and writing a bunch of announcements.

I’ve had a few consulting calls with companies where they (or their VCs) want to call their software open source but have no interest in community development and want to block competitors from taking any advantage of it.

I remember looking for Sourcegraph submissions on HN, their CEO's (sqs) first submission to HN was titled "Which Open Source License Should Your Project Use If You Want to Raise VC$?"

QED.

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