[akoboldfrying]

You're right that it's no one on HN's responsibility to outline the full risks of starting a business, but no one is claiming otherwise.

Presumably jraph's goal in writing their comment is to convince us that starting an Open Source company is a good idea -- but they haven't succeeded, for the reasons mentioned. If they want to convince more people, then they should come up with counterarguments to the top level post's arguments (and if they don't want to convince more people, that's fine too).

[jraph]

> but they haven't succeeded, for the reasons mentioned

No, I haven't succeeded because I haven't tried yet. However, I am surrounded by open source companies that succeeded.

The comment I responded to obviously reasons theoretically, and confuses some things. I will answer two aspects of it:

> Open Source makes "competing" with an existing company trivial, but with none of the invested costs. So the first mover, the program author, is always at a strategic disadvantage

That's not true. You can't just take some open source program developed by someone else and make money out of it. Let's say I develop open source product P. I offer support and consulting. Let's say you want to compete with me on P. You initially lack the expertise and the notoriety. If Alice and Bob want to get support or consulting for product P, they'd better turn to P experts, which is the company that builds P, me. For you to get customers, you need to prove the world that you are an expert. It takes spending time with the code, and also on marketing. But while you are spending time on this, I am too. You will also fatally need to contribute improvements to the product you are selling to make your customers happy. Actually, if you start contributing, it's a win for both of us and our companies can even be friends.

I'm not making this up. That's actually where I work.

> This is not an accident- it is baked into the very point of open source

So we just countered this. I'm not saying there's no risk. but that's not "by construction".

> There's a reason that very few people in the bazaar actually make decent money. There's a reason the cathedral has treasures.

And now we are confusing development methods, not "open source vs not open source". You don't need to be organized in "bazaar" to build free software. Look how, for instance, SQLite, as open as you could dream, manages very well with their non contribution policy. They are profitable. They have a "first mover advantage".

> These are two pretty distinct concepts, and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well.

Well, they can.

But my biggest argument is that you don't need to believe me. Many "actually open source" companies have succeeded. So, what gives?

I don't need to actually build an open source company to prove my point. Others have been doing well. Maybe me in the future, that's not completely excluded. Thing is, being employed also has advantages.

[akoboldfrying]

Thanks for responding.

>For you to get customers, you need to prove the world that you are an expert. It takes spending time with the code, and also on marketing.

I agree with this, and that the makers of P likely enjoy a big (and genuine) advantage in being considered the authority in all matters P. But for a competitor (me, in your example), spending time with your existing, working code is much less time and effort than writing brand new code, and that difference in my effort levels is the disadvantage, for you, of going Open Source vs. closed-source.

>SQLite, as open as you could dream, manages very well with their non contribution policy

I wasn't aware that SQLite was a profitable enterprise. I have to admit that this is a very strong example for your case, given the competition in this area from other FOSS software (PostgreSQL, MySQL).

[bruce511]

The real potential competitors are current staff. The risk is not that -I- want to invest all the time and energy, its that a small group of existing experts aka your current staff, decide to do it.

There's also possibly a small % of users who end up knowing enough to end up doing "mostly supporting others". They can end up becoming competitors as well.

So yes, this model can work, as its currently doing for you (and others). But it certainly is a lot harder to build, and keep such a business going.

Being an employee of such a business is great. You still get a paycheck every month, so the model is irrelevant. Owning such a business though is precarious - basically the staff can walk anytime, and effectively take all the customers with them.

[jraph]

> basically the staff can walk anytime, and effectively take all the customers with them.

I suppose something like the ownCloud / Nextcloud breakup could happen.

You need a big enough set of employees with all the skills required (product & customer relations) such that these employees will be collectively more efficient than who remains to be willing to leave at the same time and still want to work on the same thing, and an important set of customers to be willing to switch to the new business.

Given how we like each others and how nice it is to work there, I believe the company would need to fuck things up big time for this to happen. What caused this at ownCloud is a political change (from true FLOSS to open core, maybe other things) and it took a co-founder + a big bunch of core contributors to leave.

I would say, if this is the biggest risk, the company is probably okay :-)

I agree with you on the fact that it is probably hard to achieve this though.

And still, ownCloud is still alive. I don't know how relevant they are and why people would choose them over Nextcloud, I'm somewhat amazed they are still there.