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Comment by redkoala | Hacker News Reader

Open source licenses as they exist today aren’t sustainable to run a business. We’ve seen with the cloud providers how easy it is to launch a competitor if you don’t have protective licensing. Gumroad’s licensing is still small business friendly and protects another Gumroad clone from being launched.

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I would argue it is possible to run a business and be sustainable on open source, it's just harder and is not so compatible with the growth that many want.

I don't have an issue with this kind of license being used where open source does not suit, but I don't think we should change/widen the definition of "open source" to suit the sustainability needs of those that open source isn't compatible with, at the impact of the freedoms and open rights it provides.

The problem is that if you're not already differentiably the best at hosting your service right when you launch, someone else that's better at hosting can just do it and take all your business.

And hosting while keeping your prices down is not just a whole different skill set, anyone that's already a big will have pricing deals with AWS so they will beat you even if you host in the exact same way.

It's probably less differentiable in the case of something like Gumroad which is less likely to have big scaling problems, but for things like a distributed database, you run a serious risk of someone who is paying AWS half of what you are per compute hour just deploy the Helm chart and undercut you completely.

Can you name some?

I've been sustaining myself for a couple of years now on my open source project (BookStack). Still going in a positive direction.

Other than that, some that come to mind: Proxmox, Opnsense, SnipeIT, GitLab, Canonical, Codeweavers/wine, Plausible, Home-assistant/open-home-foundation/NabuCasa, FreeBSD Foundation, Laravel, Blender, Godot.

Within there is a whole mix of business plans, some offer hardware, some are open core, some offer related paid services, some offer hosting, some offer support etc...

Thank you!

Which is fine. Not everything needs to be defined to be suitable for businesses. It's even fine for things to be defined to be explicitly not suitable for a business.

> Gumroad’s licensing is still small business friendly and protects another Gumroad clone from being launched.

That's fine and dandy, but that doesn't inhibit me from rewriting the code from scratch and creating a clone myself by just matching Gumroad's existing feature matrix.

RoadGum.py, here I come!

For web services maybe. I don't see Amazon destroy the business of a desktop application.

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