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by jedberg 1065 days ago
> We believe a project like this needs financial backing and a dedicated team driving development

What benefits do you get from being open source other than the OS stamp of approval?

Perhaps the solution is to just go closed source. I'm all for open source, but I'm not the biggest fan of open core or source available. All it does it hurt the business with little benefit to me. I'd rather you make more money and support me or go full altruistic and make it truly open source.
2 comments
ersatz_username 1065 days ago
We aren't open source because we want to get anything out of it is the short answer. Of course to each their own but I've personally gotten a ton of value from open core tools in the past.
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sanderjd 1065 days ago
Don't its customers get the benefit of being able to self-host and modify for their own internal use? Seems like a big benefit to me...
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jedberg 1064 days ago
My point is if it's a commercial entity, I'd rather pay them to make the modifications and then maintain it than pay my own engineers to do it.
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sanderjd 1064 days ago
Yes, but if I want to make larger modifications than would make sense for the core project, I'd like to have the ability to self host my modified version (and ideally have a support contract as well, if they're into that).

So you asked what the point of doing this is for them, from a business perspective. I think the point is marketing / smoothing the sales process. I feel much better about using SaaS products that I know I can self host if necessary, even if I'm unlikely to actually do so.

Frankly, it's just the same reason I prefer any of my tools to be open source. I don't like using proprietary programming languages or frameworks, because I can't fix things that are broken even if I want to. This remains true even though I can count the number of times I've actually done this on one hand.

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