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by goldfeld 4814 days ago
I can't help but sympathize with the Morozov rant on O'Reilly when bleeding-edge tooling like this get sold as services and not offered up as free software for all the community to move forward (and it's not like both can't coexist even.) It's all in the name of startups and "rockstar teams," when open source projects themselves could benefit so much from code analysis/review tools (possibly more so, given the more fractured nature of the contributions.)

To the OP, please don't take the Code Climate (and so many others') road, consider creating an open source community around your product and then offering enterprise service on top of THAT. If you don't, you're gonna face dire competition sooner or later, even if you are the first to market. If you do, you have the chance to establish yourself an ecosystem that'll keep on giving back, in both code and publicity.
3 comments
rcfox 4814 days ago
Free and open source software is awesome. However, if you spend all of your time build great tools that you give away for free, then how are you supposed to pay your rent and eat?

I know, there are plenty of open source projects that make money, and plenty of open source projects that thrive despite not making money. None of those are MVPs, like this project is. I doubt anyone who started on those projects was depending on them to make a living right away.

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profquail 4814 days ago
I think what he's saying is that the tools could be sold with a model similar to GitHub's -- the tools would be free to use for open source projects, but you'd have to pay to use them for your closed source projects. The idea is that open source software could benefit from having better tools to work with, while the software company still turns a profit off of commercial users.
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bfish510 4814 days ago
How does one make sure that their code isn't used in a closed source project though? What's to stop them from using it if no outsider will see their code?
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profquail 4814 days ago
You can't, if the code is hosted separately from the tool.

The solution is to provide the tool and the hosting together. For example, GitHub or Bitbucket could acquire this service and add it to their offerings, and it would fit right in with their existing business model.

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rcfox 4814 days ago
I think you're getting even further away from open source.

If this tool could connect to a remote repo (like the GitHub repo) and operate on the changelog, then you'd be fine. No one would be able to use it privately without publicly exposing their repo.

Perhaps then you could charge a fee to get an ssh key to add to you authorized_keys file, which would allow for private use.

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lukeholder 4814 days ago
At least codeclimate is free[0] for open source projects. Would love to see an open source version of code climate though.

[0] https://codeclimate.com/pricing

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sneak 4814 days ago
Counterargument: The Github webapp is not open source. They seem to be doing okay.
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