Unfortunately I’d never advocate for something like this at my work. Self-hosting doesn’t make sense in terms of total cost of ownership. I’d rather engineers spent time solving problems in our core business than making sure our wiki is online.
As with a lot of modern open source, the monetisation comes from providing a hosted/ supported cloud version so your engineers can spend their time solving your core business problems rather than making sure the wiki is online.
That said, it's a Beta, and they've put 12 months into it already to get it where it is.
It's great to have open source competition in this area, so the current lack of a cloud option should put it in the "awesome, I'll check it out, then wait for a cloud option" category.
The ability to self host also doesn't prevent someone, including the original developers, to also proving hosted services.
And since the presented tool is open source, it's also possible for another company to provide hosting.
Open source isn’t a business model.
Right, though that's orthogonal to the self-hosting aspect.
> Open source isn’t a business model.
Indeed but you can build a solid business model around open source. What do you mean?
Even if it's just a stop gap solution while we find a better solution to migrate to.