| That's actually an excellent reply. It's sort of what I thought, but I wanted some insight from the trenches. My company is: https://www.zerotier.com/ I offered Dropbox as an example case because what I'm trying to do in the virtual networking space is incredibly similar to what Dropbox did in the file sharing and collaboration space. I'm trying to attack an old market with a new approach, a completely new piece of technology, and a superior user experience, hoping to unlock a "sleeper" market very much like what Dropbox accomplished. (I look up to Dropbox, at least from a business example case point of view.) My client and server software (actually the same thing) are open source, but my pretty web UI (https://www.zerotier.com/admin.html) has a closed-source backend component that runs its API. The network is peer to peer with managed supernodes, which are just peers that are designated as permanent trusted anchor-points to permit rapid zero-configuration provisioning. I run those and offer that service for free. I charge for the convenience of the web UI, which allows people to set up virtual networks with a few clicks. Techno-geeks can dig into my open source and run their own "netconf master" if they want, but so far I've had precisely zero people (that I know of) do this. There's no real value in it to anyone. My business model is freemium and I'm starting to get a couple of paid users out of hundreds of unpaid. (My bandwidth costs are tiny since it's p2p, so I can be profitable even with really awful conversion rates. I have lots of ideas to optimize by offering more pro features.) So yeah... much like Dropbox. I'm working on putting together a seed round for this to take it from side business to Real Company. :) Just wanted to ask to see if being OSS is going to repel potential angel/seed VC investors. |