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by the_mitsuhiko 901 days ago
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.
1 comments
cuu508 901 days ago
> 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.

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the_mitsuhiko 901 days ago
> 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.

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