[berkes]

This is a race-to-the-bottom though. Or a marathon-of-deepest-pockets, whatever you call it.

If you decide to make people pay up, a competitor will step up and offer a free version, subsidised from VC or lucrative other businesses. And if the competitor isn't free, at least its cheaper: triggering a race-to-the-bottom, ending in "free".

In any market, for any service with potential, there will be a free, or at least cheaper option. Untill mono-/oligo-polies are established and prices go up, at which point the customers are "extorted" or close to it: all the losses up to now, must be paid from revenues now.

This is seen everywhere (from food delivery, via webhosting, to PAAS to SAAS) and a clear and present proof of why "free markets" aren't automatically efficient and need authorities poking around in them - or else they hardly work at all, let alone efficient.

[throwaway412114]

This is only true under the premise of profit motivation or some other kind of competition, which is not inherent to the FOSS ecosystem.

>In any market, for any service with potential, there will be a free, or at least cheaper option.

Which is not bad at all. IMHO the only problem here are business decisions, slowly locking you into something. FOSS nerds prefer protocols over platforms, which is why Posix and Linux living up to it are so incredibly important. You are right about the markets being misaligned, which is why we have to be very sceptical about big corps buying into various FOSS-foundations.

[berkes]

I presumed we were talking about the service part and not the software part. My comment was about running a service and not about offering FLOSS (or no floss) software.

Though I expect the same applies there too, only that "race to the bottom" is less of a negative thing. And could probably be "race to open-source". Where slowly all paid-for software gets FLOSS alternatives that -at some point- offer competing support/features/experience and therefore make the paid/proprietary alternatives more or less obsolete. E.g. while Oracle is still running and offering their database, on the whole, the world runs free databases. While Microsoft still sells billions of OSes, on the whole -including Android- the world runs Linux mostly. And except for OSX, hardly any other paid-for unixes survived. And so forth.

[dgb23]

That’s assuming quality is a constant and is purely objective.

Is there an opportunity cost in providing a gratis/marketing tier versus focusing more on paying customers?

[Jenk]

aka free market capitalism..