[bjacobel]

Are there other examples of an open-source community project taking on several million dollars in venture capital funding? It seems a bit odd to me.

I'm not sure I'm comfortable using a presumably open-source, free (beer and speech) tool knowing that the group behind it will have to find a way to monetize their users in order to justify the investment from VCs at some point down the road. Open-source developers should of course be able to be compensated for their work, and the project has to find a way to sustain itself (I work for a company whose main product is open-source so I know this better than most), but the venture capital model doesn't seem like a good fit with the interests of the community, in my opinion.

That said, Serverless is a great tool, and congrats on the 1.0. Thanks to the team for their hard work.

[matlock]

Thanks, appreciate the shoutout!

There certainly are other open source tools like ansible, Chef, Puppet, Hashicorp, MongoDB (and many more) that have started out as an Open Source project and are still OSS champions.

We have many plans for monetisation and are working closely with small to enterprise scale companies on building products and services around the Framework that help you once your infrastructure has reached a large scale. More info to come in the future.

[bjacobel]

To expand on my last point, how are you balancing the needs of an open-source community (steady, stable feature development, good communication/outreach/support, dedication to supporting existing products) with the needs imposed on Serverless by the VC funding model (acquiring new users quickly, launching new products you can monetize, getting hockey stick growth)?

[matlock]

The Serverless Framework is at the core of all our monetisation strategies, so we need the Framework to be spread to as many developers and into as many teams as possible and allow for way more complex infrastructure to be built. So by necessity we'll be pushing really hard on moving the framework forward.

I don't think the needs of an open source community stay in stark contrast to VC funding model, because without the Framework getting a lot of traction our other products aren't as interesting. So we'll be working on getting that traction. And we can't do this just by ourselves. We wouldn't be here without the Contributor community (literally because they implement so many features) so without good communication, outreach, support, ... we won't be able to grow fast enough.

I can only tell you that it is our true intention to push the framework forward very hard and build monetisation around it as much as we can to build this into a long term sustainable company. The more help and feedback we get to build the right commercial products and get great revenue (so we can give our Investors as well as our Team a return as well) the happier everyone is, including the community.

[SEJeff]

hashicorp is a company started my Mitchel Hashimoto. There is no open source tool named hashicorp. Do you perhaps mean vagrant?

[matlock]

Sorry yup I conflated Open Source Tools and Open Source Companies into one. Vagrant, Terraform, Packer, Serv and all the other great stuff coming out of Hashicorp.

[emdowling]

Realm, most recently featured on HN here[0], is a good example of this. Open source, widely adopted base product, with optional consultancy and now a full-featured platform for enterprises that need/want it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12589426

[ac360]

Lots. Docker, HashiCorp... It's the go-to-market strategy for lots of products now, especially developer tools.

[joeblau]

Yeah, it seems like the strategy from the VC perspective it to eventually get the team acquihired by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Facebook.

[marknadal]

I raised almost half a million for an Open Source Firebase ( https://github.com/amark/gun ).

The license is MIT which guarantees we can't coerce you to do anything.

What alternative for compensation do you propose?

[bjacobel]

There's a few models I've seen work well:

- Kickstarting: Django REST Framework's development was successfully funded for a year or more by funds raised on Kickstarter[1]. This model doesn't scale that well.

- Sponsorship: DRF is also a good example of this. Corporate sponsors who use the product are asked to chip in as sponsors, in return they get some branding placement and community goodwill. It seems Serverless was at one point using this model (sponsored by Coca-Cola), it's unclear why they had to stop.

- Services/support model: as popularized by Red Hat, Canonical, etc. Give away the product for free, make money on support contracts.

[1]: http://www.django-rest-framework.org/topics/kickstarter-anno...

[erichocean]

> Are there other examples of an open-source community project taking on several million dollars in venture capital funding?

https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/30/cockroachdb-just-raised-20...

[gjolund]

Meteor and Docker come to mind.