Comment by ffdixon1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ffdixon1 | Hacker News Reader

I’m the co-founder of BigBlueButton, an open source virtual classroom we’ve been building since 2007.

About three years ago, we integrated tldraw into BigBlueButton as our whiteboard. It’s been an excellent upgrade over our old, simple whiteboard — tldraw is a fantastic project.

I'm also the CEO of Blindside Networks, the commercial company behind BigBlueButton. We have growing by the traditional open source business model: we offer hosting, engineering services for acceleration of features, and support contracts.

I understand the motive behind tldraw's change of license. Open source projects often get asked two contradictory questions: 1. Can I use your work for free? 2. Can you guarantee that you’ll be around in 5 years?

You can’t answer (1) without a solid plan for (2). Licensing changes are one way projects try to answer both of these questions.

We are no stranger to license changes, we recently rewrote the entire back-end of BigBlueButton and moved away from mongoDB to PostgreSQL + Hasura.

For us, moving to tldraw 4.0 would mean:

- As Blindside (the company): buying a commercial license — that’s straightforward as we are also a commercial company. - As BigBlueButton (the open source project): it would require every organization running BigBlueButton to obtain its own license key to tldraw.

There are pros and cons here. We want a world-class whiteboard in tldraw based on a sustainable open source project, but we also want to keep BigBlueButton’s community deployment model simple.

Curious how others in the HN community have handled integrating source-available components into open source projects. How do you balance sustainability with accessibility?

Answering those two questions depends a bit on the "you" in the question. If "you" refers to the open source project/code, then both can be answered with a resounding "yes". If on the other hand "you" refers to you individually or as a company, then the first can be answered with a resounding "no" and the second a solid "maybe, that depends on how much you are willing to pay us for a 5 year support contract" (though you should probably word it a bit differently when talking with potential clients).

As far as working with source available components, suggestion one is to look for others int he community that you can cooperate with to maintain a fork, and option two, if you really can't get the community to support a fork, is to make it a plugin/optional component, preferably with an API so that other solutions can be integrated as options, or at least a fallback to the old version that was open source.

Seriously in this specific case I'd cut a final version with V3, then going forward include v4 in main with a note about the tldr licence in readme. The licences are affordable for anyone who wants to use your project, and if they can't they'll have to make do with that old unsupported version of your project.

How is $6000 per year (upfront) affordable? And that's the pricing for startups with <10 employees, surely large organisations / schools (which seem to be the audience of BigBlueButton) will pay much more. What about non-profits etc?

At this point tldraw v4 seems to offers no significant improvements over v3, which does everything I want from a whiteboard. I think most people who can live with the previous watermark will just stick with v3 permanently.

If you've got lets say a 6 person start up your wage bill would be ~$1 Million a year, $6000 feels quite reasonable. I agree that this seems pitched towards "we're making a saas" style startups and that for direct end users this is more difficult however if you can perswade tldraw to price this based on the IT staff your school has then if you've got a group of 5 schools each of 2000 kids, you probably have a IT team of 8-10, $500/month is $0.001c per child per day.

> We have growing by the traditional open source business model:

I know this is not relevant to the thread, but could I pick your brain on this model? I'm looking at launching a product soon and I've been struggling with how I might monetize it in a sane manner that works for customers and for the business.

Here's a tip: when you want to ask somebody a question just ask the question. Do not ask if you can ask a question because you waste everybody's time

To be fair, I did ask a question. The question.

Really, that was your question? I think I can see how you got into a position where you are launching a new product soon and you don't know how you're going to monetize it

Sometimes a conversation is easier than a brain dump in a text only space. Which is why I said 'can I pick your brain' rather than write a massive wall of text of things I've considered, research I've done, product/market fit, etc.

You could do something in between like ask a specific question which is what my original comment was about

Reply on news.ycombinator.com