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by leonnoel
3506 days ago
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Is there a name for companies that release their code under an actual free license, but charge for other things like support? Companies that come to mind are flynn.io or sidekiq.org (both of which were recently on the front-page). |
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Great question. We just consider ourselves to be a normal company that happens to build open source tools. We also try to make money in ways that don't interfere with the open nature of what we build.
There are lots of different kinds of companies whose engineers primarily work on open source projects. In most cases where their core "product" is an open source technology they also sell commercial support, usually to large companies who need an SLA. Others (like us) sell managed services as well.
We made the decision before we started the company to make anything we ever asked users to run on their own machines permissively licensed open source and just be careful with our trademark (like Mozilla is[1]). That leaves the door open for closed-source SaaS in the future but gives our users (and investors) a clear set of expectations about how and what we'll build.
I think it's important for companies to be as clear as possible about how and why they license their code, what choices they'll make in the future, and what happens when the company changes hands. It would be great to see something like an "open source pledge" where founders/the company could contractually commit to either a final open source release before closing (like Parse did[2]) or staying open after being acquired (like Sun didn't after being acquired by Oracle [3]).
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/policy/ [2] http://blog.parse.com/announcements/introducing-parse-server... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(operating_system)#Pos...
edit: We tend to avoid calling ourselves an "open source company" which can get confused with the "open company" movement[4].
[4] http://www.opencompany.org/