[joejoebags]

I wrote it last night; I didn't have time to research every "open core" company I could think of to figure out a chronology of their licensing strategy. I decided to publish it based on a limited number of case studies to gin up discussion and hopefully learn from other people about counter-examples. Do you know of any?

[hannob]

Of course by mentioning any name here I risk that they might be a future candidate of closing down and you say "gotcha" :-)

Not all of them are "open core" in the sense that they have a core product and proprietary extensions (some just opensource everything they make), but a number of relevant companies around FOSS products: Gitlab, MariaDB Corporation, Blindside Networks (Big Blue Button), Qt Company, Mattermost Inc.

[joejoebags]

Also--thanks for going on the record. You are right that you might be criticized in the future by nit-pickers, but it's much more satisfying to take public stances and find out what you're made of (in my opinion).

[pletsch]

Big Blue Button is outstanding for any educators looking for tools. Full disclosure that it was built at the school I attended, we had a lot of profs use it and it was by far my favourite way to do distance learning.

[joejoebags]

Thanks, those are great examples. I've considered writing about Mattermost before, as I think it's a fascinating pattern that I haven't seen much elsewhere. Attack an existing, high-profile app by cloning it in the open but then additionally build a for-profit company around the clone. Truly a galaxy brain strategy.

[paulgb]

I’ve been interested in this pattern as well. I’d contend that GitLab is another good example, and even argue that Automattic is too (IIRC Movable Type was already a successful proprietary blogging platform when WordPress came along)

Which is all to say, if you write that post, I for one will read it :)

[evanelias]

I don't think Automattic really fits the same pattern. Although Movable Type was one of the earliest and most successful source-available blogging platforms, there were a bunch of others soon after. They all had similarities in functionality, by nature of being blogging software, but they weren't exactly "clones". WordPress was actually a fork of another early blogging software, b2/cafelog.

When Six Apart made Movable Type's license more restrictive in 2004, a portion of the userbase jumped over to WordPress. Another thing in WP's favor was ease of hosting, due to being written in PHP, vs Movable Type's Perl. This all led to a lot of momentum for WP; Automattic was founded after that, in 2005.

[paulgb]

Thanks for the context. I wasn’t really involved in WordPress until a few years after, so the early history is foggy to me.

[vngzs]

I'll name some more, with the same disclaimer:

Confluent (Kafka), Redis Labs, Eucalyptus Systems Inc. (AWS clone, acquired by HP), Instructure (Canvas)

[JKCalhoun]

I'm stupid in this space, but as an outsider, is this "the end of an era" because it looks like MapBox is simply pulling the tried and true "bait and switch" which has been around forever.

In that regard, "open core" (or open source for that matter) was never a business model — the business model always was bait and switch. Open was the bait.

But likely I have always been a little suspicious of "open source" and likely I am now over-simplifying.

[eikenberry]

"Open source" was created as a marketing term and companies using it as such shouldn't come as a surprise.

[jayparth]

Literally tons within the data ecosystem. dbt, Great Expectations, Dagster, Seldon. The list goes on. My employer Tecton has an "open core" called Feast and we are doing great. Mattermost, PostHog also come to mind.

Databricks has shown that you don't need a crazy license to win. I disagree with this article from my personal experiences and my industry experience but I respect you writing it. The business model is clearly alive though. Those companies that I listed have raised 100-200M in the past year at high velocities.

[lmeyerov]

vc $'s may be seriously clouding the analysis here.

in terms of revenue justifying big valuations, how many healthy companies are there, really? ("spend $20M to make $3M..." = not healthy) What about ratio of OSS successes vs closed successes, esp w/ efficiency?

e.g., the biggest co there is databricks (and i continue to root for them!), and contrast w/ snowflake who started in a similar period, grew 10-20X bigger, and started more simply (get a clone of redshift without doing business w/ aws). worse, databricks took a lot of phd students many years with a lot of big corp funding before the vc's got involved: that's a high bar an oss co must hit vs not for adjacent high-growth spaces.

the good news for oss founders is VC's are warming to investing here, and sometimes, even before OSS traction. irrespective of profitability, the founders have a better chance of flipping it to be someone else's problem.

not necessarily as clear cut for community-minded co's though that want to be financially healthy for their community. it seems the bigger and more numerous successes are non-oss, and despite the many oss attempts, the big sustainable oss successes have to doubly succeed at what is already hard. If going OSS increased chance of success -- and didn't actively challenge success -- I'd expect relatively more successes by now. I wish all this wasn't so but it's hard to unsee...

[skrtskrt]

Hashicorp