[chii]

> decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source.

these companies decided that they can leverage the marketing that is "open source" in order to gain mind share and traction, after which they start looking to charge.

That is what i associate with any open source company.

[jraph]

It's not always pure marketing. There are companies who truly have open source / free software in their DNA. The founders are true open source proponents, and some people joined these companies because of the open source aspect. Because of this, sometimes, a majority of the people in these companies are pro-open source and will skew things towards this. Some don't even have investors pushing against this.

What do you think about WordPress, XWiki, Nextcloud, Passbolt, Univention, LinPhone, Element, Igalia for instance?

I don't know the internals of each of these, but I believe they all manage to make money from open source by keeping the free software / open source spirit.

[usrusr]

People, founders or not, are of little consequence when they are not owners, and majority at that. Which companies of that list are bootstrapped, and which have taken outside investment? I would only consider the bootstrapped ones valid entries, all others just haven't left the pretend stage yet.

If you already did base your list on bootstrappedness, consider this post strong agreement: because that's what I'm trying to say. Yes, there are companies that can be considered "true to the idea of open source" (sqlite! Even though technically neither a company nor open source), but there's a clear cutoff.

[jraph]

> I would only consider the bootstrapped ones valid entries, all others just haven't left the pretend stage yet.

I agree with this, though excluding companies burning investors money is already raising the bar higher than for closed source ones. Most companies are not bootstrapped and never leave the pretend zone. Of course not a fan.

XWiki and Nextcloud [1] are definitely bootstrapped. Element is definitely not.

Automattic (behind WordPress) has raised funds, also bought back private stock [3], not clear what it means. They also seem to make money from closed source software.

I would expect any of these company, except maybe Element, to actually make money from their open source activity.

When I'm making those lists, I also don't consider open core and/or obviously VC-founded companies, like Mattermost and GitLab.

Side question, in which ways SQLite is not open source for you? It seems pretty much open source, I'm fine with open source software not accepting outside contributions. They still guarantee the important user freedoms of free software.

[1] https://nextcloud.com/about/

[2] https://www.igalia.com/about/history

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic

> Fully employee-funded and pursuing an organic-growth strategy, Nextcloud already turned profitable by the end of 2016

[usrusr]

You are right, sqlite is public domain and I fell victim to some echoes in my mind from the early days of the open source licencing theorizing when "pubic domain is not" was an important talking point, but I guess the thing public domain was not is compyleft (or one of its mostly overlapping siblings), not open source, the superset of everything not closed.

[the_mitsuhiko]

I’m not convinced that Open Source is a marketing terms that matters much for many industries (SaaS, hardware, probably others). If anything the continued push back against people trying to stay aligned with the Open Source community and have commercial enterprises tells me that in many ways you’re probably better off not trying in the first place. I personally don’t think that’s the right message.

It is hard to be open licensed but find other players in the space who just want to commercialize other’s contributions without giving back. And I have not seen any practical proposals for how to deal with this without changing license terms away from the OSI definition.

[cuu508]

> It is hard to be open licensed but find other players in the space who just want to commercialize other’s contributions without giving back. And I have not seen any practical proposals for how to deal with this without changing license terms away from the OSI definition.

Proposal: SaaS. Offer your product as a paid hosted service. Sure, other players can take your shiny awesome product, and launch a competing service. Compete with them! As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes.

[the_mitsuhiko]

A closed source SaaS is the worst for customers in terms of risk. An open source SaaS runs into the freeloader problem:

> As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes.

That is somewhat true but in many ways it turns out that customers treat the open source version as what it is: open source. This means that they do not shame, reject or decline the offer of some other company to provide bespoke deployments of open source SaaS. It’s not even just Amazon, there are also smaller companies who are interested in self hoisting Open Source software for their own customers. The time advantage does not appear to matter there.

[cuu508]

> That is somewhat true but in many ways it turns out that customers treat the open source version as what it is: open source. This means that they do not shame, reject or decline the offer of some other company to provide bespoke deployments of open source SaaS.

Sure, but that's the thing! If you want to call your product open source, you have to be OK with users taking your product, and running it themselves, and giving nothing back. They are not "freeloaders", they are normal users of your open source code.

> It’s not even just Amazon, there are also smaller companies who are interested in self hoisting Open Source software for their own customers.

Compete with them!

PS and BTW you do get something back even from your free users: free marketing and user training.

[the_mitsuhiko]

> If you want to call your product open source, you have to be OK with users taking your product, and running it themselves, and giving nothing back. They are not "freeloaders", they are normal users of your open source code.

The issue for me is that there is no term for what we do with the FSL. It’s much closer to open source than source available as it literally upgrades to open source after two years.

On the user definition: open source doesn’t draw a line between an end user and a competitor. That’s part of the challenge here.

> Compete with them!

Personally I rather compete in a level playing field.

[ayuhito]

> You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes.

You may also be one step behind when it comes to infrastructure related bugs or support if you want to focus on providing the best product. Competitors who host your product have a much smaller scope to worry about which may lead them to have a better infrastructure and support structure that customers flock to. E.g. Elastic vs AWS

Except infrastructure and support may also be the only revenue stream for the original developers too.

Some may say that’s exactly how it should be in the free market and I agree (since you chose the OSS license model over something else like FSL), but it does highlight how the original developers may feel this is an unfair situation.