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by cycloptic 2273 days ago
The oldest viable and proven business model where you can keep 100% open source, is to sell support contracts and warranties. This model is harder for your average SaaS company to pull off but provides much better ROI if you can actually do it.
1 comments
Carpetsmoker 2273 days ago
It only works well if you have a decent amount of large enterprise customers (like RedHat); I don't think it will work out well for GitLab, which is mostly aimed at small-to-medium businesses. I don't think it's viable for most projects (otherwise they would be using it).

Even if it is viable, you're usually leaving a lot of money on the table, and even Red Hat – the poster child of this model – does stuff like releasing updates to paying customers first.

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cycloptic 2273 days ago
You are always leaving money on the table. The choice of business model is only a decision of whose table you are going to leave it on. The downsides of the open core model have already been mentioned here. I am not suggesting that GitLab change their business model, I don't have any opinion about what they should do. But I will say that releasing updates to paying customers first is still consistent with being 100% open source, as long as those updates are still released to them under an open source license.
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