Zulip Project Values

> Many modern “open-source” companies use a version of their product with some basic functionality intentionally removed as a demo for their non-open-source paid product.

I've been burned by this a couple of times, and I'm unfortunately now highly jaded when it comes to for-profit open source projects. I think it's not just "many companies" but "pretty much all companies" do open source as a performative marketing ploy.

Suppose you want to break into a market with a strongly entrenched leader - say, eCommerce, then you need to find a niche that sets you apart from Shopify. But finding profitable niches is hard, and success is far from guaranteed. So instead, you can performatively declare that your project is open source, while only paying lip service to writing docs or providing support - nobody can complain if your response to support requests about self hosting are terse and unhelpful, because of course, you're doing a service to the community by providing self hosting at all right? But in actual fact you're only doing performative open source for marketing purposes, and either removing features from the self hoster version, or simply making it hard enough to successfully set up, that the sunk cost fallacy will drive people who tried to self host into giving up and paying for your hosted/managed product.

Some companies maybe are not quite this evil, but if they don't strongly and genuinely commit to making sure that people can actually self host, which means providing decent docs, and at least basic support, then it amounts to the same thing. Good intentions don't make a usable open source project.

I've been burned by RocketChat, Outline wiki, Odoo, MedusaJS, Saleor. Of these, the worst was RocketChat, who put me into a sales funnel and chased me for weeks, refusing to answer basic questions about pricing, while providing a self hosted product that is absolutely useless when you go past about 3 or 4 users.

You'd think I would have learned by now! But at least I can try to spread the word about this practice. Maybe Zulip is different. I hope so. But make sure you can find reviews or examples of other people successfully using it before you invest too much effort.