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by eloff
3354 days ago
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Leaving aside how odd it is to see a "competitor" give business model advice, open core is a perfectly fine open-source business model. Pure support based models, with very few exceptions, leave too much % of value on the table to make a strong business. Purely closed models take away too many freedoms from the customer (but can be very successful nonetheless.) Open core is a very reasonable compromise. The problem with InfluxDB is that they pulled a bait and switch - they launched looking like they were going to be fully open, and then went back on that later. But at the end of the day any compromising on open-source ideals is going to piss someone off - heck even just choosing one OS license over another is going to piss people off. It doesn't matter. In business you need to have a thick skin to stick to your conviction about what is best for both customers and the company - whatever that may be. |
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https://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/19/rotten-to-the-open-...
A purely services based model is difficult, but so is open core. With open core you compete against yourself. Look no further than Nginx as an example and how lousy it is to do things like say a http healthcheck of HEAD /status. In haproxy it is trivial, it can be done in nginx plus, but not the oss version (at least it wasn't supported in any of the versions I tried a year ago sans the commercial version). When you compete against yourself you get put in a difficult situation "Does this valuable user contribution to my OSS project compete with my commercial fork?" and that is just all around a bad situation to be in for the community and for the company.