I've never in general been a fan of "open core" products.
As someone who builds things, it feels like poor craftsmanship to put obstacles in front of your users and limit the extent to which they can use your work.
It also feels like decisions to hamper how people use a product are driven purely by greed.
Let's imagine a world in which Sourcegraph were completely free software. They would probably still have enterprise customers pay them to securely host Sourcegraph on-premise. They wouldn't be able to charge per seat. They would have to make sure their product was cheap enough that their customers wouldn't save a ton of $$ by hiring engineers to maintain Sourcegraph on premise themselves.
I am curious if they (or anyone else running an open core business) has estimates for:
1. How many customers they would lose if they went fully free.
2. How much revenue they would lose if they went fully free.
Building free software and charging people to host it can be the foundation for a sustainable business, but it's unlikely to give VCs the kind of outcomes they want from a successful investment.
To be honest, I think it's fine for infrastructure to be closed/proprietary. There are good reasons to do this if you are writing programs for which security is important - releasing your infrastructure code freely gives attackers a lot of ammunition to work with.
If we believe in the power of automation and in building high quality software, it is possible to build free software that:
1. Is easy for you to deploy and maintain securely on customer infrastructure.
2. Requires very little operational overhead from its you as the host (in terms of support).
3. For which the infrastructure code is proprietary.
As someone who builds things, it feels like poor craftsmanship to put obstacles in front of your users and limit the extent to which they can use your work.
It also feels like decisions to hamper how people use a product are driven purely by greed.
Let's imagine a world in which Sourcegraph were completely free software. They would probably still have enterprise customers pay them to securely host Sourcegraph on-premise. They wouldn't be able to charge per seat. They would have to make sure their product was cheap enough that their customers wouldn't save a ton of $$ by hiring engineers to maintain Sourcegraph on premise themselves.
I am curious if they (or anyone else running an open core business) has estimates for:
1. How many customers they would lose if they went fully free.
2. How much revenue they would lose if they went fully free.
Building free software and charging people to host it can be the foundation for a sustainable business, but it's unlikely to give VCs the kind of outcomes they want from a successful investment.
To be honest, I think it's fine for infrastructure to be closed/proprietary. There are good reasons to do this if you are writing programs for which security is important - releasing your infrastructure code freely gives attackers a lot of ammunition to work with.
If we believe in the power of automation and in building high quality software, it is possible to build free software that:
1. Is easy for you to deploy and maintain securely on customer infrastructure.
2. Requires very little operational overhead from its you as the host (in terms of support).
3. For which the infrastructure code is proprietary.
This can lead to a very solid business.
Why don't we see more businesses like this?