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I agree with your perspective but let me try to formulate an argument against that.

1. Trust over a product or platform can be formed in many ways. Opensource is an irreversible way of doing that. I have often seen people equate opensource to free usage of the product, it is great for adoption but very bad when it comes to monetization. Even if your project is available as OSS if you don't have community around it, disappearance of the org is still a threat.

2. If there is no market, you don't any incentive to maintain it forever. Google fusion tables is probably that case. The market perhaps was not large enough.

3. I do buy into incentive to opensource for building an eco-system

4. I do buy into the larger impact argument but question is - will you keep maintaining it if there is no incentive for you in the process?

I have seen lately, lot of VC backed orgs posting OSS as a differentiating factor than their competitors. I am not sure if I would buy into that argument.

> will you keep maintaining it if there is no incentive for you in the process?

Speaking personally, Datasette is the first project I've worked on in my entire career where I'm confident that I would be delighted if I was still working on it in 10-15 years time.

The space it operates in - analyzing, exploring and publishing data about the world we live in - has completely limitless appeal to me. Every project I've ever cared about can be attached to it, especially given the plugin architecture which supports me trying out all kinds of weird and interesting applications for the core technology.

If I can't make it work financially it can go back to being a side-project for me. I'm confident the financial side of it can work though.

> Speaking personally, Datasette is the first project I've worked on in my entire career where I'm confident that I would be delighted if I was still working on it in 10-15 years time.

I feel the same way about cloud custodian and starting stacklet, but I also put stuff into a foundation, so that it has proper survivability beyond the org, irrespective of the org's decisions (Ala hashicorp), and true survivability and impact on an oss project means getting past individual contributor bus factor.

> Speaking personally, Datasette is the first project I've worked on in my entire career where I'm confident that I would be delighted if I was still working on it in 10-15 years time.

That's a bus factor of 1?

You know what's more cool though? A 100 years: https://archive.is/qnWWX (didn't work out all that well for Evernote, regardless). I'm sorry but this script has been sequel'd over again and again. May be, just may be, you're a unicorn (:

Part of the reason I want to make the project financially sustainable (aka earn enough to hire a team) is to increase that bus factor.

I wish you success. I think you are super motivated and vision is very clear.

I've been using and pitching datasette at my employer for a long time now. It's just so useful for so many ad-hoc tasks in my work.

With all due respect, a project being open source means nothing for trust. There's a litany of open source projects that I have used that have been completely abandoned.

Trust comes from building a healthy ecosystem of users, which ultimately comes from building a good product.

>Trust comes from building a healthy ecosystem of users

Trust comes from the publisher/author being truthful and honest with users, nothing else. By publishing source code, an open source software publisher is making a strong statement towards trust: you can see everything. Nothing is hidden (this is not true though when a company uses an open source client and closed source back end strategy).

> There's a litany of open source projects that I have used that have been completely abandoned.

There's also a litany of abandoned closed source commercial software and SaaS products. Keeping commercial software alive requires money. Keeping open source alive requires time. In the end, both are scarce and the author/publisher has to make a decision on what to invest in, and sometimes the software they sold to me last year doesn't get that investment. If it did, I'd still be using NBI Legacy to write documents, I'd be running OS/2, Microsoft Bob would be helping users make Windows work, and I could read news with Google Reader (aside Bob, all of these were at least good products. Bob was... ahead if it's time).

Being truthful doesn’t mean much. Actions are worth much more than words.

What trust is seeing how a product has evolved over 5-10 years.

I think you’re missing my point. My point is focusing on whether a project is open source is relatively meaningless. It’s like using the price at a restaurant to judge the quality of food… it’s almost meaningless.

It means a lot to me. Thats the first thing I look for in a company/concept. releasing code to the public is an act of social responsibility. I means quite a bit to the public good.

The public good still exists no matter what people in business think. It just takes awhile to effect your bottom line if you ignore it.

Being truthful is an action, the best kind of action. It develops trust with people over time.

> There's a litany of open source projects that I have used that have been completely abandoned.

Yes, but being able to continue using, and even fixing bugs in the abandoned project is way, way better than having a useless pile of bits because the license server was taken offline. If may not be a great situation and you may well want to migrate to something else, but it is a far more graceful exit than closed-source software usually is.

> Trust comes from building a healthy ecosystem of users, which ultimately comes from building a good product.

This isn't enough. Great products with many users are often acquired and shut down or just change their licensing strategy to be unsuitable (either too expensive or too restrictive).

Did you have the newsroom angle and monetization plan in mind when you started working on Datasette? Or did you start working on it first and then come to the monetization strategy after you realized that it resonated with people?

It's been inspired by newsrooms and data journalism since the start, see https://simonwillison.net/2018/Aug/19/instantly-publish-data... for the story.

I made an open source license that you may be interested in. It's basically the AGPL + copyleft for _services_ that are dependent on your service, as well as build tools. You can check it out here: https://github.com/candiddev/cpl.

That's kind of like saying "I have a fork of bash that you may be interested in". It fails the familiarity test, and that's really important.

Does that really matter in the context of a license though? The terms are the terms, if folks don't agree with the terms they can negotiate different ones or not use it.

There isn't a lot of people thinking, gee, I want an unfamiliar license, so you're going out on a limb by showing someone a new one. Just like if you made a fork of bash with some new feature and were like, "here, use this".

If you want your software to be used, yes it matters very much.

matters a lot, most orgs have a whitelist of permitted licences, and if some software you want to use isn't on it you have to jump through loads and loads of hoops, so much its usually not worth it.

I said almost exactly the same thing a decade ago with my own project.

I learned a lot in that time.

It’s closed source now.

How are you going to monetize it? Your site has no mention of pricing.

I'm going to charge organizations a monthly fee for using the hosted SaaS service.

Implementing billing and setting pricing is next on my TODO list!

Will the billing system itself also be an open source plug-in for datasette? :D

Sadly not, it's going to be a Stripe subscription management dashboard!

So now you have to manage both the core software and the hosted version.

Whereas your competitor just needs to build a hosted version, use the core you provide for free, thereby having a fraction of the expense and the ability to undercut you on price.

You have to realize going in that once you try to monetize your open source, some of your users become your competitors. They’ll tell you how great you are, while cashing checks off your hard work.

I'm ready to take that risk. WordPress and GitLab seemed to survive it OK.

Survivorship bias.