[sneak]

> We will always be open source, and we make money by charging a per-user subscription for our commercial version which will contain fine-grained authz, bring-your-own OIDC and custom domains.

Seems to me that these are at odds. If you're open source, why does anyone have to pay for these things?

If you're open core, I think it's mighty misleading to say things like "We will always be open source" because then not only is it untrue on its face, but also if someone contributes useful features to the open source project that compete with or supplant your paid proprietary bits, you are incentivized to refuse to merge their work - extremely not in the spirit of open source.

My perspective, which you asked for, is that open core is dishonest, and that you should be honest with yourselves about being a proprietary software vendor if that's indeed your plan, and stop with the open source posturing.

If I've misunderstood you, then I apologize.

[davelester]

SaaS is a common way for open source companies to create revenue, look no further than WordPress, GitLab, Databricks, DataStax, and many others. Kudos to the opstrace team for taking this path.

There’s nothing inherently dishonest when a company emphasizes their open source strategy. Open source community building is as much about shipping code as it is leading people, and that requires you to be transparent about your intentions. I’ve interpreted opstrace’s release as just that.

I think the concern about neutral project governance is an important one. It’s early days, but from what I’ve seen it seems clear what is being sold vs what is open today. The fact that the project is released under the Apache v2 license means that folks are able to reuse, distribute, and sell the project as they wish — even fork it if they dislike the direction. That said, if governance is a priority for your use I’d definitely look to project in neutral software foundations like the Apache Software Foundation and CNCF.

[sneak]

Open source and proprietary with source publicly available are not the same thing at all.

[fat-apple]

Thanks for your feedback! As with many in the industry, we are trying our best to figure this out.

Our intention is to be really transparent with how we build and price software, which is why our commercial features will also be public in our repo, but commercially licensed. Transparency is critical in our opinion.

This is the model we’ve seen work for other highly impactful software projects.

We’ve created a ticket to track our addition of commercial code to our repo: https://github.com/opstrace/opstrace/issues/319

[sneak]

Ahh. The commonly used "open source" term is a synonym in practice for "free software", so if you are a proprietary software vendor that is source-available but calling it "open source" (when really, it's not) is a different type of misleading.

Don't call source-available proprietary software "open source", or say that you'll "always be open source" if you're just going to be source-available for parts.

[kazinator]

I'm gonna put on my St. Ignucius robe here, and say that yes, that behavior is within the limits of "open source".

If they used "free software" language, then we might have a case for posturing.