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by cryptonector 801 days ago
To this day the single most successful open source business model is the SQLite Consortium's. Their approach is to make the codebase open source (public domain even) and the test suite proprietary. Having a fantastic test suite that is proprietary acts to blunt the community's ability to fork the project, and it encourages those who want new features to pay for consortium membership because the team can't easily accept outside contributions (because in order to do so the team has to write tests for those outside contributions). It's brilliant!
1 comments
andrewpolidori 800 days ago
It is an amazing model! I think it works well because it's a library that is "infrastructure" / "support" for other systems though (browsers, android)

I wonder if it applies to the kind of software that is more complete like anything with a UI etc. If I get the final result the tests don't mean much to me.

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cryptonector 800 days ago
Well, it applies to very popular software. SQLite3 is probably the most popular software ever written. This really might be a special case. But it probably would work for things like: OpenSSL, PostgreSQL, Java, Rust, and a few others. Most if not all of those don't need to change models, which leaves newer / less popular projects, and for those to bootstrap this model is difficult. It might be that the SQLite model is unique -- that it won't be repeated much or at all.
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