My interpretation is the opposite. MongoDB is clearly successful - they are a public company worth 16 billion dollars. And they proving the <i>success</i> of the open core business model.<p>For 99% of use cases, MongoDB is open source. You can see the code, you can make modifications, you can use it for free in your business, you can share your changes with others, you can integrate it into your products and services. Yeah, you can't use it if you're working at AWS, but for most people it's just fine.<p>For founders creating new open source companies, it's a great strategy to go the route of MongoDB. Start off open source and sell services. If you run into big enough problems with direct competitors using your own software, you can modify the license to exclude them.<p>This is far better than the status quo in, say, 2010, when the conventional wisdom was that if you're providing a service it shouldn't involve any open source at all.
IMHO "open core" is not a good idea in the first place.<p>Open source is about an open community, open contributions, the multiplier you get from contributions from multiple companies. That way open source is a win-win. Companies benefit from each other's contributions.<p>It's _not_ about just showing the code or a free-for-all.<p>Once you have free and non-free tiers it's already broken. The incentives no longer align.<p>I'm being paid in part to work on the open source projects that we utilize for our service(s). Some of those we started, some of those we're contributing to, but we _own_ none of them. We handed them off to external entities (Apache and others) for governance and we actively encourage others to participate.
I feel there's a few cases cited here to make a case that an entired business model is dying, but it doesn't look to me that this is an overall trend. You can't extrapolate from "5 projects didn't fare well with this, so it's not working".<p>But there's more. I followed the MongoDB case a bit and it's not exactly how many make it sound like. MongoDB was doing fine as a company. It wasn't like they were unable to pay their programmers because AWS offered a hosted MongoDB.<p>In the months before that controversial license change they got plenty of funding from investors.<p>It looked all more like investors created expectations of future revenue and they became cold feet if they could meet those expectations.<p>It remains to be seen how this will work out in the long run. I'd personally consider everything that depends on MongoDB to be toxic. With that license it won't be shiped in standard linux distros, other projects are less likely to build on it.
This seems to me more like another case of "death of a business model caused by revenue maximization strategy". "Open-core" does not have "non-viable" or even "must-be-bait-and-switch" stamped all over it. But if the organization using it decides that its primary goal is revenue maximization (and/or significant growth), then it becomes much more questionable how it will fare.<p>But isn't that the goal of any business, I hear you cry? No, it certainly is not. There are thousands of small businesses even just in the USA that are happy to work within the limitations of their situation and initial desires.
Could it be that, rather than the death of a particular variety of open source ("Open Core"), that the author has in fact described yet another open source business model? One that specifically extends Open Core?<p>Consider:<p>- Company releases the Secret Sauce as open source under a highly permissive (non-reciprocal) license<p>- Secret Sauce coalesces a large, engaged community around it<p>- Company pays the bills with support, consulting, and other complementary products/services as it bootstraps itself<p>- Company releases v2 under a traditional non-open license<p>Everyone profits from this arrangement, potentially. Small users get good, free software to bootstrap projects. Big companies build stuff on top. And in the end, Company takes a portion of the open source audience with it into v2.<p>Finding that audience and getting them to pay attention is not easy at all. Think of Open Core as the car that gets you there, to borrow a quote from "The Comeback."
> if you give your secret sauce away for free, and it gets popular enough, cloud providers will inevitably spin up competitive services using your very own code against you.<p>For some reason, the author never mentioned AGPL. What's wrong with using this license if you want to defend your open-source business model?
Mapbox releases Mapbox GL JS v2 under a proprietary license whereas v1 (presumably) was under an "open core" business model. (Mapbox v1 and v2 are graphics card enhanced mapping libraries?).<p>The author of the article's thesis is that this is "an end of an era" of Open Core business models (putting core technology under a free/libre licensing and charging for extra proprietary features).<p>I'm very curious as to what other people here on HN have to say about it. Gitlab, a prominent company that follows an Open Core model, is a YCombinator alum, no?
It's not clear to me that open-source-as-a-business-model was ever vibrant enough that it makes sense to say it has now died. Open-source-as-a-<i>funding</i>-model was surely a thing, but turning open source into a source of consistent and growing free cash flow has been much more rare.<p>At my last start-up the first things to go out the window when we wanted to stop burning money were the commercial Aerospike and Nginx licenses. That was five years ago.<p>The most durable model for commercially-funded open source is as a stratagem for commoditizing someone's complement. If you want to stick it to Apple, fund Android. If you want to stick it to Oracle, fund PostgreSQL. If you want to stick it to Microsoft, fund LibreOffice. If you want to stick it to Sun -- er, Oracle -- fund Linux.
I'd say good riddance. Open core to me always felt more "openwashing" than honest attempt to build free software project/community. Part of the feeling arises from the fact that when teenager me first started learning about foss software, Linux, GNU etc one of the things that made such a great impression was that there was no feature gating, no "enterprise editions", nothing locked away. Instead I had all the power in the world on my fingertips. The idea of being built by hackers for hackers to fill their needs resonated to me a lot, not having marketing or product driven development but scratching your own itches. Open core fits very poorly to that worldview.<p>edit: This comment might have started out bit harsh, apologies. I did not mean to imply malice on the companies that tried to make open core work, but rather bit of naivete or misunderstanding regarding open source and building business around that.
I believe this is mis-stating the extent of redis re-licensing.<p><a href="http://antirez.com/news/120" rel="nofollow">http://antirez.com/news/120</a><p>> Today a page about the new Common Clause license in the Redis Labs web site was interpreted as if Redis itself switched license. This is not the case, Redis is, and will remain, BSD licensed.<p>> What is happening instead is that certain Redis modules, developed inside Redis Labs, are now released under the Common Clause (using Apache license as a base license). This means that basically certain enterprise add-ons…<p>That is from a few years ago, but I believe it's still true, and basic redis is still FreeBSD. This isn't a slight of hand where "basic redis core" is open source but not really useful by itself, I think the majority of redis installs have never been using those "enterprise add-ons".<p>I don't think this is necessarily a problem for the author's theory in general, which I am generally sympathetic to as accurately describing something going on in the software world right now, but I think it's misinformation about redis.
As much as I want open source software to be good, commercial software has the inherent advantage of having hierarchies and teams that are all powered by compensation. We could really use some kind of platform in the open source community built around (a) making it easy to fund projects, AND (b) making those projects organizable, with a team lead and contributors.
Self-hosting of software is what is changing. The open-core model is really built around maintaining installations of software on your own hardware (or virtual hardware). "Paying for pro" made sense in that world. With many things you would have installed and maintained on your own hardware moving to a SaaS model and PaaS model, there's really not much of an opportunity to "sell the pro version" outside large enterprises who are 10 years behind the curve. My latest startup owns zero servers. Costs scale on user count (for office stuff) or utilization. Licenses? I get calls from software vendors, and it's hard to even understand what they are selling because I don't buy licenses anymore.
Redis is given as one of the examples of "open core" failing. But even if you treat the new Redis source available license as completely proprietary, Redis is still open core, since the core is still licensed with BSD 3-clause. It is just that some of the extensions that used to be open source are now proprietary.
I disagree with this article’s premise that all software is services-based. There are lots of open-core business models that can’t be eaten by the cloud providers, because they aren’t services to be spun up.<p>Almost all of the CNCF-based businesses are complex plug-in models that the CPs can’t just make a button for.
100% agree. Make a thing, and charge a reasonable amount for it.<p>And if someone wants to make the same category of product free and open source, that's cool too. Live and let live.
In the future contributors might insist on a DCO instead of an CLA so that it is impossible for the project to change from open source to a closed license. Debian insisted on that when switching to GitLab <a href="https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-dco-license/" rel="nofollow">https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-...</a>
2020 strike again!<p>Seriously though, this article makes some assumptions I’m not sure about. One of them is that Mapbox’s move will be successful. I’m not sure it will be, most users of Mapbox probably won’t upgrade to the new version or will upgrade to whatever fork becomes most popular. In the meantime this is going to make people a lot warier of using them as a tile server and give impetus to their competitors in that market space. It’s quite possible they’ll start to see declining revenues pretty soon.<p>The success of their strategy is tied to the greatly expanded 3D capabilities of version two. It’s really cool and the demos are super sexy but for the vast majority of use cases 2D maps are a better fit. Given the distrust they’ve generated and the massive increase in licensing cost attached to their new model for many customers, there are now some extremely compelling reasons for customers to drop them.
I work with open-source for the last 8 years, as a business owner and as contributor.<p>There are a lot of people who assume that the biggest value of using open-source project that it is free. Additionally there are a lot of idealists who think about oss as foss.<p>Open-source is not dead, it just trying to find a sustainable model for survival.
None of the active OSS projects you know exist without money flow.
Even if you have hyped project now, without money it will be dead in a year.<p>More and more companies consider open-source as default option, because there are a better tools right now to make business out of it. And everyone essentially wins from it.<p>Yes, old models of OSS are mostly dead.
But new ones are alive more than ever.
It is not a "cloud" that damages open core projects, it is Wal-Martesque cloud providers. If you are buying lots of infrastructure from AWS, there's just no reason to buy MongoDB or Redis from their creators: you would just put more load on your accounting, monitoring and cost controlling and will have nothing extra in return, except pride for supporting open source.<p>There is an interesting model at Google cloud, where I can deploy and use a Grafana stack for moderate $50/month. Looks like Grafana gets a solid chunk of these money - they are advertising it on their own website.
In the back of the head this gives me an idea for a marketplace startup for software utilities but I know it's been tried before and died. I don't know how to align the incentives of creators to where we can make a marketplace where open source is lucrative by design.<p>But I don't think it's impossible, just the social hurdles haven't been cleared yet. Not much technology to throw down on the problem.
I don't think anyone should have a realistic expectation of making money directly from an open source project. You have to be strategic and tactical in how you approach the problem of monetizing.<p>If you don't do it, someone like Amazon will. If you want to make that difficult or impossible, use a copyleft license. The choice of a permissive license implies things that you have to think about upfront.
> Redis adopted a strategy of adding a severely restrictive “commons clause” to updated versions of their existing open source tools,...<p>Severely restrictive? I'm amazed at how bad (undeserved imho) reputation Commons Clause license got. The new Redis tools' license is basically the same, just less clear. The same with MongoDB and MariaDB's licenses. In effect, they all forbid selling to 3rd parties - and yet, being less clear, they are deemed 'OK' while Commons Clause, clear and to the point, is frowned upon.<p>I firmly believe that both proprietary and FOSS licenses are extremes and that a new batch of "cloud protection licenses" will help develop software that will protect core users' freedoms and still allow maintainers to work on in fulltime. Commons Clause was simply ahead of its time - I'm waiting for its descendants to prosper.
As a maintainer of a a relatively tiny "open source" project, I've been going through the same thing over the last few months. People relied on the project, ok let's go open-core 99% is free, a few obscure features require a license key.<p>Now I'm seeing cloud providers built on top of my project with almost no significant changes (other than I guess bypassing my licensing mechanism) and they contribute nothing in terms of support or code.<p>Now I'm building out the cloud service and am slowly moving away from this being an open source project to more like a project that has some code that you can see and a public issue tracker.<p>I have several pitch decks/one pagers ready to go and written up for VCs but have been hesitant due the reasoning in this article.<p>But there is soon coming a time when I will have to pull the trigger and send those emails.
I think the business model and the software license often get conflated like this. Once you release software with an open source license, users are free to do what they wish as long as it's within the bounds of the license.<p>Separately comes the business model. If a business intends on selling a hosted version of their product, as most open source database companies seem to want to do, that product needs to compete on its own merits. Can the business truly offer a better hosting experience on someone else's cloud than those cloud providers themselves?<p>I think maybe we conflate the two because we want everything. We want to create open source products that a community contributes to and supports but that only the originating company can monetize. It just doesn't work that way.
Open core makes sense if you can provide a "light" version of your product that is already useful, and most professional users of your free product will eventually get into a situation where the "pro" version will save them money or will have a feature they dearly need, so they upgrade.<p>I'm not familiar with Mapbox JS toolkit but maybe the problem was that the free version was too useful already, so only a few of the free users saw the need to upgrade? In that case I can understand why they put it under a commercial license, because providing free support for the project can be a burden.
There never was an open-source business model.<p>Among the thousands of open-source projects, the ones championed as a successful business make a tiny proportion i.e. the <i>exception</i> not the norm.<p>Meanwhile the SaaS business model continues to eat the software market. A model that gives users less control than the desktop software model.<p>Open-source software has been critical to the success of the SaaS model. You could argue SaaS is the true success of the 'open-source business model'. Just not the way open-source advocates expected it to be.
Open source doesn't work and I'm glad the world is starting to understand.
It promotes unfair compensation (or lack thereof).<p>If you have the skills to advance technology and no capital to invest to acquire other technical solutions you may need, you can get a job and use that money to pay what<p>Expecting free work from people rarely work, there are just not enough motivated individuals willing to work and maintain something for free.<p>Most open source I rely on is either backed by a giant company which uses it as a way to attract talents (and retain talents, by letting their employee work on their favourite project on company time) or it's unmaintained.
If it's unmaintained I either need to do the work myself or hire someone, which introduces a myriad of variables.
I'd rather hire the author but often he's busy with his real job and doesn't think he can live off its project.<p>If it wasn't for the OSS movement and the sheer amount of free work we would have a network of company buying OSS solutions and, most likely, more distributed, smaller companies that produce and resell proprietary software.
But… there's nothing wrong with the business model, no? It's not that they aren't making money by selling an enhanced version of the software, it's that they aren't making <i>as much</i> money as cloud services? Or did I misunderstand?
Post logic: Here is an example of a company taking their software closed sourced after previously being open. Also, AWS.<p>AWS uses the crud out of open source. They admittedly "steal" it in that they fork it internally, applying patches, add UI, and then sell it. They still depend highly on basically all the open source software in the world.<p>That Amazon does this is a rallying call for new licensing schemes. Large monopolistic companies such as Amazon need to be legally shut out of this type of abuse of open source software. So long as we go "It's fine. You have to allow this to truly embrace open source" then we will continue to see Amazon try to shut down all "open core companies" that they can by outright stealing their IP.<p>Open source is not developed primarily by hobbyists or aficionados. Most open source imo comes from closed source projects being open sourced by companies in order to gain free testing, free work ( contributions ), and more market share ( exposure / interest )<p>Heralding the death of open-source seems like nonsense just to grab attention. I agree that the large companies are trying to crush open-core companies that are small, but it is obvious they are doing this and there will be a backlash from those of us who don't appreciate their meddling.
Sorry, call me a grammar Nazi, but when I see the word "thusly" when "thus" is perfectly serviceable, I can't be bothered to read any more...
if only there was a way to make cloud providers charge a per second usage charge for software used...
And an open source licence that could support that...
I wish there was a FOSS license with a clause along the lines of:<p>- if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it.<p>Ofc, they (FSF/OSI/DFSG) would have to relax their FOSS definition(s), but with more projects dying in this way hopefully more FOSS organisations will take heed and think about this.<p>Ofc, the wording of the license has to be precise enough to avoid something like fobbing off the servers to technically be controlled by subsidiaries with 0 revenue.