[saled]

Hmm. Am I the only one who immediately jumps to the thought that any VC backed "open source" tool is just using open source as a cost of customer acquisition, and will soon find a way to pay-wall necessary features? The majority of the effort will be in the paid SaaS product, not the open source stuff.

Maybe I'm getting old and jaded, but that's not really the spirit of open source.

[n2d4]

To quote myself from another comment chain:

> Both Zai and I care a lot about FOSS — we also believe that open-source business models work, and that most proprietary devtools will slowly but surely be replaced by open-source alternatives. Our monetization strategy is very similar to Supabase — build in the open, and then charge for hosting and support. Also, we reject any investors that don't commit to the same beliefs.

[dang]

YC does an 'open source panel' every batch where people come to hear from founders of successful open-source startups in order to learn the ropes. I've attended 4 of those by now (I think), so I have a sense of what gets said about this stuff from within the YC space at least.

I haven't heard anyone talk about ways to "pay-wall necessary features" or otherwise exploit users into paying. On the contrary, there's a lot of talk about how critical it is to be transparent and fair with your community. The consensus is that things tend to go well if you do that and badly if you don't.

The focus for these open-source companies is finding a natural way to carve out the free vs. paid parts of the space. By 'natural' I mean something that is a good fit for the domain and that both sides feel is fair. The free users know it's in their interest for the company to make money because that's how the whole thing is sustainable. People just need to feel that the paid product is one that it makes sense to charge for and that it's a fair exchange.

The most common way to do this is to open-source the product and offer a paid cloud offering. There are other approaches which I remember I found rather interesting, but unfortunately I forget the details because thanks to HN I never remember anything anymore!

But the main thing is no, not only are these founders not looking for ways to screw their open-source users, the seasoned ones are advising the junior ones to shy away from the slightest trace of that. The model by which an open-source company is making money needs to be as transparent and unimpeachable as possible.

One downside is that it's hard to get this right from the beginning, and changes can be messy. From what I've heard, the consensus is that if you keep a good relationship with your community at every step, and preserve transparency as an invariant, then it's at least possible to explain why a change is necessary and get through a messy phase that way.

[klabb3]

While I do take your word very seriously and believe it’s 100% honest, it seems incongruent with most things I’ve seen and experienced over the last decade or so. There’s to me a very real crisis or at least dilemma for businesses that would love to do FOSS but can’t or won’t for unfortunate reasons.

Products are frequently over-complicated so self-hosting is difficult. There are often outright rug-pulls or dark patterns, keeping basic features behind their cloud offerings. The mega corps sometimes swoop in and take all the candy from the kids. Products are designed suboptimally, eg kubernetes native when they would be much better as a library. Then you have honest well meaning players who lose customers to self-hosting, because they need on-prem for security reasons, or simply because they want better debugging and logs.

Some varied examples off the top of my head include Docker, Hasura, Redis, Hashicorp, Benthos. My point here is combining small-medium sized businesses with a core FOSS product is full of perils, risk and unhealthy market dynamics. I’d assume the iceberg is also much bigger than these prolific projects, from companies that chose not to do FOSS in the first place.

[theredsix]

You should evaluate the FOSS software features AS IS and ask if you're okay with the current feature set if all future features are behind an "enterprise" tier. If you are, and the hosting of the current version is manageable, then the product is good for both sides. I've often found running the numbers for paying the vendor for cloud vs amortizing devOps costs comes out in favor of the cloud version. I see this as a win-win for both the customer and the company.

[ramonverse]

I think COSS is great, it makes the code more secure and auditable and makes sure the developers get paid to fix security vulnerabilities. Volunteer OSS is great in theory but it sometimes leads to overworked developers being exploited by foreign intelligence services https://www.techrepublic.com/article/xz-backdoor-linux/. Supabase & Nextjs are part of the so called VC backed open source and they are great.

[no_wizard]

My opinion is that Supabase is one of the best models for OSS business we have seen. Do they get everything right? No, but they embody the spirit and adjust slot based on community feedback.

Vercel on the other hand, not so much. They’re closing the loop on multiple open source avenues and have been making features Vercel hosted only for awhile now. It’s getting harder and harder to properly and easily self-host Next.js for example.

[mooreds]

> Am I the only one who immediately jumps to the thought that any VC backed "open source" tool is just using open source as a cost of customer acquisition

I wrote a blog post that touches on this tangentially: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3595

Even if they pay-wall necessary features (or are forced to by investors), the software can be forked.

[digitcatphd]

Same here. I’d rather them be transparent with the price and just undercut them. Last ‘open source’ YC project I reviewed almost felt like a hidden trap paywall. If they could cut my bill in half I’d switch, there is no reason Auth0 should charge so much. On the contrary another YC project just cut their competitor pricing and we are using them.