Comment by peterldowns | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peterldowns | Hacker News Reader

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Re-asking [0] as a top-level question, since it has gone unanswered: do you intend to make a business out of this project in some way, or is it a "real" open source project?

I know that intentions can change, but I'm curious how you see it. Sourcegraph was pretty clearly always going to be a business-type-of-project, and like most business projects, relicensed everything to their custom enterprise license. Originally it was Apache 2 [1].

I love open source and I write a lot of it myself [2]. I use the MIT license, just like you've done here, and I admire that. I don't think you owe me or anyone else anything, and the MIT license makes that clear.

I am very interested in this project and I'd love to extend and contribute to it, but only if it's an actual open source project. Seems like every devtools-focused startup these days calls themselves "open source" but fails to actually build a community, because in reality it's just a marketing gimmick. Because the project is actually a company, the people involved never try very hard to build a community of contributors. When the company invariably cannot make money with an open source product, the code gets relicensed to be closed-source. The few people who had contributed end up getting played. That's what happened to Sourcegraph!

So: open source, or open source "for now"?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41715776

[1]: https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph-public-snapshot/c...

[2]: https://github.com/peterldowns

Not the author, but given that this is a relatively small UI wrapper of a zoekt[1] backend, it seems like the risk here is isolated to the upstream Sourcegraph-maintained search dependency. By relatively small, I mean that the total SLOC for UI code in the entire project is around ~3.5k (compared to the backend which is currently 25x the size). Seems difficult to ascribe any enterprise motivations given that and additionally the UI seems very useful as-is even if you had to fork it and build a new community from there.

[1] https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt

There's not really "risk" either way, I'm a fan of open source and I'm also a fan of businesses making money, I just don't want to donate time and energy to a business.

What they've described smells a lot like a thing that needs to become a business — see Sourcegraph — and Brendan [0] and Michael [1] are currently working together at a startup they founded.

I'm getting tired of seeing other businesses pissing in the pool by claiming to be "open source" purely for the marketing benefits, so I figured I'd ask up front and see what they say.

Should be a simple answer either way!

[0]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-kellam/

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/msukkari/

Yea I think I understand your motivation re: not donating your time. I guess my assumption was more-so that the likelihood of 3k SLOC UI project becoming a business seemed incredibly remote. Perhaps that is misguided.

Thanks for the thoughtful question.

This is still day 1, so we honestly don't have an answer if we will get to a point where we can monetize - it's too early to tell. However if we do end up going down that road, I don't think generating revenue and being a good steward of open source is mutually exclusive.

My view is that there is a balance that can exist between open source and building a profitable business that doesn't negatively impact the open source community. Companies that come to mind that I think are striking this balance are PostHog & GitLab.

Thanks for the reply — to be clear, I understand your answer to be “this is a business but we’re not yet sure how we’ll make money.”

Great work so far; best of luck!

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