Sentry looks like a good model for OSS, and it's proof that you can make a living from OSS. I also don't have anything against "enterprise features" for which you need a license, while most features are available in OSS version.
Every single open source company eventually learns this when they have a strong competitor. Eventually you are forced to stop being open source, because no business wants to compete solely on the strength of their service quality.
Moreover: a community is antithetical to a corporation's interest in the software. Corporations don't give a shit what people want changed in the code, for good reason: their purpose is to make money, not make good software. So business source always ends up annoying and limited while community open source provides the functions the users need, in the way they want them.
So, yeah, you can make money while letting people read your source code. But the actual quality of the end result, the user's happiness, the ability to contribute to the whole thing, is much different in a real community project.
For example: Open source database that works on one machine. If you like it and want want to scale up, you can pay for the replication and authorization features with paid support.
Just ask Docker. There's thousands of companies using Docker Desktop that should be paying for it but aren't. Same for most other Open Source companies with business licenses. Because they set themselves up as an "open source" company, all the villagers revolt when you finally ask to get paid, or stop allowing competitors to steal your lunch. You can survive, but it's very hard, and eventually they die away. (But that's also because most software gets replaced after a decade)
You have to treat your business as a business first and foremost if you want to remain profitable and competitive. You can use Open Source for your business, but you will not survive for long if you're hoping people will pay you just because they can read your code. Eventually reality, and competitors, come knocking.
I’m a pretty rusted on Odoo developer, this has been their business model for years and it’s worked thus far, even when facing off with the likes of the SAP and Dynamics of the world.
Infisical is an open core business model. While there is a proprietary crust, the core is truly open source.
Disclaimer: I run an open core venture
Many of the open source companies are their own strongest competitor, see HashiCorp.
Either that or they have to go at least semi-proprietary.
TBH my view is that the frustration towards open source companies around changing their licenses is sort of misguided. If there's a bad guy in the room, it's AWS. AWS is very good at commercializing open source -- they make literally billions of dollars doing so: Elasticache (Redis), AWS Managed Elastic, RDS etc. Changing the license becomes one of the only ways to hold them off, and the companies that have done so more proactively have fared much better. I think everyone agrees that in an ideal world this wouldn't have to happen, and indeed it didn't really happen until recently when the AWS thing started to become an issue.
Ultimately, SOMEONE is going to leverage the open source for financial gain. So, the question becomes which would you rather have:
- The company commercializing the open source (which is in almost every successful case includes the original creator(s) as a founder, CEO, or employee) benefit from the projects success, which in turn allows them to make further investment in the project.
- AWS benefit from the projects success and (generally speaking) contribute very little back.
Of course, there are plenty of projects that are NOT venture funded that see great success through purely community development. That's great! I just think commercial open source is beneficial as well, especially for larger more complex projects (databases, etc.) that need the funding. The two are not mutually exclusive.
I am also of the belief that the additional funding (both from revenue and from venture investment) that goes into these projects gives them the ability to hire more people, which in turn makes the software better for everyone.
Disclaimer: I am investor that invests predominantly in commercial open source companies. Previously I was developer who used a lot of open source, which is what led me here.
Sentry is using the BSL, the very same license that HashiCorp has switched to but that change has not been received well.
It's the bait and switch and bullshit language ("evolving open source") that gets people riled up.
If you want to write software, in a community, for the betterment of that everyone, no matter what anyone else does with that software, then release it as open source.
Can you still make a comfortable living writing open source software? Perhaps, but if that's your goal, you're doing it wrong(tm).
Open Core is also a thing, and I think it's better than BSL because at least the core part is truly open.
As for Open Core, there is one case in which I think that's fine: when none of the proprietary parts would be useful at all in an otherwise 100% FOSS environment. For example, if Linux support were FOSS but all the Windows- and macOS-specific code were proprietary, or if a plugin to talk to Bugzilla were FOSS but a plugin to talk to JIRA were proprietary, I wouldn't see a problem.
How well would your example companies deal with a PR adding open source macOS platform support, or an open source JIRA bridge?
OSS != FOSS
https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-07-open-core-is-misun...
While this statement is technically true, I don't think it has any relevance to the topic at hand. While there are some relatively obscure licenses that are OSS but not FOSS (e.g., the Sybase Open Watcom Public License), isn't everything under discussion here either both free and open source, or neither free nor open source? In particular, the "core" of Open Core is both, but the extras are neither.
> The Business Source License (this document, or the “License”) is not an Open Source license. However, the Licensed Work will eventually be made available under an Open Source License, as stated in this License.
I think the real issue is that people want more community driven OSS. Stuff that is collaboratively built and not built for a commercial purpose. They want something I think along the lines of KDE where there are paid people to work on it, but it's also contributed to by a community and there isn't someone constantly trying to a make a buck off of it.
Using BSL strikes me as trying to have a cake but eat it too: look, we're good open source guys using an open license. Feel free to use our code, but only after it is well beyond its best before date!
Where is this community funding supposed to come from? Would OP here really personally donate to a team making a secrets management tool?
It's turtles all the way down