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Comment by zeeg | Hacker News Reader

This is the problem with the definition. If the product is trurly open source, call it that. If its not, thats ok, but don't. Core has no real definition.

I definitely would never call GitLab Open Source. I can't comment as much on the others. Sidekiq is actually how I think the world should work: its open source, and then they sell Sidekiq Pro. One is Open Source, one isnt. The issue is most people don't operate that way.

GitLab Community Edition is Open Source, GitLab is not. Cal.com isn't open source, but is the Cal product? I'm not sure. Given I started Sentry I can at least use it as an analogy. Early days Sentry was open source, but getsentry.com was not (which was our billing infra). No one would have called Sentry Open Core, because no part of "Sentry" was closed source. That's not true for most Open Core.

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> Sidekiq is actually how I think the world should work: its open source, and then they sell Sidekiq Pro. One is Open Source, one isnt. The issue is most people don't operate that way.

I guess this is where I get hung up on this topic. To me, there's no real distinction between Sidekiq's open-source core and proprietary features vs GitLab's. One has their proprietary code closed-source, while the other has it source-available in a monorepo. Functionally though, I don't see the real distinction. If Sidekiq can call itself Open Source by you, then why can't GitLab? They're both doing the same thing in the end, if you really reduce it down to its core (pun intended?).

I think we had a similar discussion before Fair Source launched i.r.t. ELv2 sharing some similarities here. I argued ELv2's license keys are yet another way of accomplishing the same thing, just differently: separating proprietary code from the core (ignoring the non-compete for the sake of this conversation).

whats so confusing about open core?

its open source for the masses and commercial for the very few enterprise with paid addons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model

definitely the best of both—sustainability and freemium OSS for hobbyists and small companies

Open Core locks important part of a product away behind a proprietary license. If you build on it you need to hope that the company will hang around. If it ever goes away you have to hope that they do the right thing a relicense it.

Whether that part is important depends on how you use that product. A lot of open core models specifically target enterprise users with their premium features.

Likewise, the risk only applies to the premium feature set. If those are that crucial to your operation, you would assess that risk more or less in the same way that you assess a proprietary product - because that is what it is.

For example, if all the security features are essential to your work and you pay for the ultimate version, then Gitlab is more or less a closed source product for you. However, if you are a big company and use self-hosted free version of gitlab to have a cheap inner source hosting for all employees, then it is exactly as if you use an open source product.

There are more nuances of course in a real assessment, but basically the open part is open source and the closed part is proprietary. Very simple.

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