these companies decided that they can leverage the marketing that is "open source" in order to gain mind share and traction, after which they start looking to charge.
That is what i associate with any open source company.
What do you think about WordPress, XWiki, Nextcloud, Passbolt, Univention, LinPhone, Element, Igalia for instance?
I don't know the internals of each of these, but I believe they all manage to make money from open source by keeping the free software / open source spirit.
If you already did base your list on bootstrappedness, consider this post strong agreement: because that's what I'm trying to say. Yes, there are companies that can be considered "true to the idea of open source" (sqlite! Even though technically neither a company nor open source), but there's a clear cutoff.
I agree with this, though excluding companies burning investors money is already raising the bar higher than for closed source ones. Most companies are not bootstrapped and never leave the pretend zone. Of course not a fan.
XWiki and Nextcloud [1] are definitely bootstrapped. Element is definitely not.
Automattic (behind WordPress) has raised funds, also bought back private stock [3], not clear what it means. They also seem to make money from closed source software.
I would expect any of these company, except maybe Element, to actually make money from their open source activity.
When I'm making those lists, I also don't consider open core and/or obviously VC-founded companies, like Mattermost and GitLab.
Side question, in which ways SQLite is not open source for you? It seems pretty much open source, I'm fine with open source software not accepting outside contributions. They still guarantee the important user freedoms of free software.
[1] https://nextcloud.com/about/
[2] https://www.igalia.com/about/history
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic
> Fully employee-funded and pursuing an organic-growth strategy, Nextcloud already turned profitable by the end of 2016
It is hard to be open licensed but find other players in the space who just want to commercialize other’s contributions without giving back. And I have not seen any practical proposals for how to deal with this without changing license terms away from the OSI definition.
Proposal: SaaS. Offer your product as a paid hosted service. Sure, other players can take your shiny awesome product, and launch a competing service. Compete with them! As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes.
> As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes.
That is somewhat true but in many ways it turns out that customers treat the open source version as what it is: open source. This means that they do not shame, reject or decline the offer of some other company to provide bespoke deployments of open source SaaS. It’s not even just Amazon, there are also smaller companies who are interested in self hoisting Open Source software for their own customers. The time advantage does not appear to matter there.
Sure, but that's the thing! If you want to call your product open source, you have to be OK with users taking your product, and running it themselves, and giving nothing back. They are not "freeloaders", they are normal users of your open source code.
> It’s not even just Amazon, there are also smaller companies who are interested in self hoisting Open Source software for their own customers.
Compete with them!
PS and BTW you do get something back even from your free users: free marketing and user training.
The issue for me is that there is no term for what we do with the FSL. It’s much closer to open source than source available as it literally upgrades to open source after two years.
On the user definition: open source doesn’t draw a line between an end user and a competitor. That’s part of the challenge here.
> Compete with them!
Personally I rather compete in a level playing field.
You may also be one step behind when it comes to infrastructure related bugs or support if you want to focus on providing the best product. Competitors who host your product have a much smaller scope to worry about which may lead them to have a better infrastructure and support structure that customers flock to. E.g. Elastic vs AWS
Except infrastructure and support may also be the only revenue stream for the original developers too.
Some may say that’s exactly how it should be in the free market and I agree (since you chose the OSS license model over something else like FSL), but it does highlight how the original developers may feel this is an unfair situation.