[echelon]

Classic strategy. Market leader is closed source. Follower attempts to be open source to gain market share despite being behind in features and market.

Has this strategy ever worked? Gitlab went public, but it's barely a fraction of what GitHub is.

Framework laptops aren't really all that big.

Maybe Android? But it had huge backing.

[eco]

BitWarden went this route against LastPass. They've had their own closed source component contoversies lately though.

[elashri]

The password manager market does not have a dominant player like Github vs Gitlab (others). Actually this would be more true if you add non commercial offerings like Keychain passwords, Google passwords and Firefox (other browsers password managers).

Lastpass didn't have a majority at anytime. And their decline is related more to thei breaches and horrible practices. They are trying to be relevant now. They offered my university free subscription for all students and faculty and still people don't even consider them. At least this is among people who consider password managers.

Also for bitwarden the controversy was about their SDK licence being proprietary but they re-licenced to open source [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41940580

[0x073]

Gitlab and GitHub can't be compared.

GitHub is a social platform.

We would need mastodon for GitHub.

[vdvsvwvwvwvwv]

GitHub is also CI/CD like Bitbucket and GitLab etc.

[Blackcatmaxy]

For how new framework is they are actually pretty big on college campuses especially among engineering students in my experience. They're still a fairly new company in the scheme of things and I'd say the strategy is definitely not hurting them.

[notpushkin]

Yeah, not enough people care about open source right now. Maybe after this incident more will!

In any case you're right, if you try doing open source purely as a marketing tactic it may or may not work out. I think one good reason to do open source is because you believe it's more sustainable, or transparent, or just being decent to your customers.

[pandemic_region]

Not sure where Framework laptops fit in that strategy. They are ahead in terms of features (but not market, granted).