[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.