[api]

So software makers should give their competitors their software with a liberal free “as in beer” license and then try to compete with them.

This isn’t a workable or sustainable model. The companies leveraging free software don’t have to work nearly as hard on software which means they can focus 100% on ops and marketing. And of course they don’t give anything back to the software creators.

[growse]

> So software makers should give their competitors their software with a liberal free “as in beer” license and then try to compete with them.

This is literally what they did when they released their product code under an OSS license. It was their free choice.

> This isn’t a workable or sustainable model. The companies leveraging free software don’t have to work nearly as hard on software which means they can focus 100% on ops and marketing. And of course they don’t give anything back to the software creators

The other companies might not need to work so hard, but they also have little to no control.

If you can't build a sustainable business on a piece of software when you are the steward of that software, control the product direction and backlog etc., then you're not very good at the business.

Or, put another way, if your business success hinges on people not competing when they have access to (and license to use) your source code, when releasing it under an OSS license demonstrates that you're not very good at the business.

[api]

> If you can't build a sustainable business on a piece of software when you are the steward of that software, control the product direction and backlog etc., then you're not very good at the business.

The elephant in the room here is that software is incredibly expensive. Developing and maintaining a large project requires a large team of high salary software devs.

I’d estimate the cost of building, supporting, and maintaining Vault at $3-4M a year bare minimum for the core team and related overhead. It also takes a ton of energy and focus all the way to the top of the organization.

The company building and maintaining the software must spend that. Someone just using the software to resell in the cloud or rebranding it can instead put all that money and mental energy into marketing and ops.

The company that does not have to maintain the software has a massive advantage. They’re freed from that burden.

[growse]

> The elephant in the room here is that software is incredibly expensive. Developing and maintaining a large project requires a large team of high salary software devs.

There's plenty of expensive, major open source projects that seem to have figured this out. The fact that Hashicop can't doesn't mean the model is broken, it just means Hashicorp aren't very good at this.

> Someone just using the software to resell in the cloud or rebranding it can instead put all that money and mental energy into marketing and ops.

It's not that simple. Once again, the "reseller" doesn't have control over the direction of their business. Which means they should always fail, long term, relative to the org that actually spends the money on controlling the development.

If you can't compete and outmanoeuvre someone who's simply slapping a label on your software, you probably shouldn't release your software under an OSS license.

> The company that does not have to maintain the software has a massive advantage. They’re freed from that burden.

I think it's pretty clear that we both take very different views on what maintaining and developing software means. You see it as a massive burden, I see it as an enormous advantage / opportunity.

[sofixa]

> There's plenty of expensive, major open source projects that seem to have figured this out

Like? Red Hat are the only one, and they sell very special software. I can't think of any other ones that are successful as a fully open source project that also has a sustainable profitable business build on top of it.