I'm all for open source software but this feels like an awfully contrived way to make a profitable business.<p>18-36 months between each stage? This feels perhaps tenable for VC backed corps but for anyone bootstrapped, this is a long, long road.<p>I'm not remotely convinced that these steps feed into each other in a more pragmatic way than... I guess any other way? Couldn't you start with enterprise sales and move backwards, releasing your stuff as OSS once you're running a stable business?<p>The thesis seems to be that without community and a proven track record, you can't make money organically, which is patently false and proven by hundreds of businesses that don't have OSS/communities. Also, SaaS seems tangential to Enterprise sales in many cases, they're often times different segments (i.e. I won't consider your SaaS since I must be on-prem) -- if you only serve one segment, you're only missing out on the other segment, not cannibalizing? This is all hand-wavey of course, but I posit that this is <i>a</i> way to <i>maybe</i> build an open source business, but I'm not sure it's a solid, proven recipe by any means.<p>Maybe once Ockam knocks it out of the park in their IPO we can look back on this with greater confidence.
Interesting post. We're also building a business based on open-source / open-core software and have managed to build an active Github community around our first product (Klaro - <a href="https://github.com/kiprotect/klaro" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kiprotect/klaro</a>). It's a pretty simple tool that helps organizations to manage consent and protect their user's privacy on their website. We have other, more complex products in the making as well (e.g. <a href="https://github.com/kiprotect/kodex" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kiprotect/kodex</a> - a privacy engineering toolkit). What we found during the development of Klaro is that even a very simple product can require a tremendous amount of work to turn into a functioning product. I think we're almost there now but it took several months of building and refining.<p>For me, the main benefit of developing in the open is the great feedback and contributions we get from our community. A lot of people have reached out to us based on our open-source work, I don't think this would've happened if we had developed a closed-source tool.
OP, assuming you are the author. This is obviously the work of someone that has lived open source for a long time, and not the musings of a market analyst or investor. The product focus suggests tactical lessons-learned driving the broader thesis outlined here. What's the origin story on the piece? I'd love to see a follow-up piece one those lessons-learned.
I read the website multiple times but I still can’t grasp what is your product exactly and what does it solves. Can you provide examples of how companies are using ockam? Thanks
Marginally related, but something I've been curious about:<p>With the recent news about things like the TSL (Timescale Licence), BSL (Business Source Licence) maybe?, and other such licences, is there anything that's more general that covers the "you can use this but not sell this-as-a-service" use-case for a broader category? For a contrived example, if I were to make a geolocation-by-IP API as an open-source (source-available?) product, and I wanted to run a business around it, but didn't want a cloud provider to just snag it and offer it unmodified, what licence would I use?
I think the secret behind making open source profitable is bringing it to the enterprise level. At first I didn't believe you can make a lot of money with open source but after Red Hat got sold for $34 billion I changed my mind. Also GitHub getting sold for $7.5 billion is pretty impressive.<p>I recommend watching Bob Young's presentation "So You Want To Start an Open Source Company" on YouTube[1], he is the co-founder of Red Hat.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJVEAXlPadg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJVEAXlPadg</a>
Interesting post! Resonated quite a bit with us at Ionic (we commercialize Ionic Framework and tooling/products around it) and have experienced every one of these steps to the letter (now in the enterprise step)! Very cathartic and insightful.