With the noise people make when you don't use an OSI open-source license, little wonder. But when Redis started I think we didn't yet boardly understand the limitations of OSI licenses in the era of big tech cloud computing.
To people starting projects today, you have no excuse, we know better. Don't use OSI open-source unless it's entirely a labor of love that you're giving away free.
OSI Open-source business models are dead. Don't make that mistake.
> That is, if I was still in charge, would I change license? But that's an impossible game to play, I'm away from the company for four years and I'm not facing the current issues with AWS impossible-to-compete-with scenario.
Not saying he would have decided any differently, just that cloud computing has changed open source situation for the worse.
It looks to me like people start with open source licenses because that's helpful to get them market-share (and in some cases community contributors and maintainers), and then they switch to a non-open-source license reserving certain rights to profit to them hoping to maintain the users that they wouldn't have gotten if they started with that license.
I am curious for examples of any projects now *starting( with one of these non-open-source rights-to-profit-reserved licenses, now that is clearly "understood". Are there any examples? Are they successfully attracting users? Contributors?
Wikipedia suggests it was initially apache, changed to BSL in 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CockroachDB. But still perhaps an example of fairly quick switch to BSL before it had gotten wide market/mind share? I don't know the history.
"We’re adopting an extremely permissive version of the Business Source License (BSL). CockroachDB users can scale CockroachDB to any number of nodes. They can use CockroachDB or embed it in their applications (whether they ship those applications to customers or run them as a service). They can even run it as a service internally. The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license."
> Don't use OSI open-source unless it's entirely a labor of love that you're giving away free.
Well, know what your secret sauce is. I think performance is really the best differentiator. Make a fully behaviourally compatible (maybe not bug for bug) version available and then sell a proprietary faster version.
Think an compiler that doesn't due any optimisation and outputs naive code. You know have a useful OSI project, and a clear value add, and a clear boundary between the two.
This is really applicable for databases, and it still leaves you with something useful for learning small projects, and for developers to run locally on their own machines.
>I think performance is really the best differentiator.
I don't understand this at all. Most open source projects start out equally as a means to give back to and collaborate with the community as well as showcase one's skills. You're asking me to purposefully publish badly optimized software? I don't have it in me. That offends my sensibilities of craftsmanship. A 'slow' open source project will never get traction. Even if it did, I also don't know how an open source project wouldn't immediately have it's obvious performance bottlenecks fixed.
Far better to go the VSCode route. Release a useful project, then release paid extensions for it.
this is the open core model, it works well for things like GitLab (as far as I know)
and in effect GitLab is doing a BSL-like thing by after a few years they release features to the free tier
but it rarely works if you need to decline contribution from people who would eat into your profit margins. I think ElasticSearch had this problem (and the community basically ended up with a few forks, because people sent the patches for security features that were in the enterprise version, and to no one's surprise they did not get merged ...)
so, I guess it works if there's a huuuge scope with plenty of things to contribute, to shoot for the moon together, without hurting the business side too much.
You can probably set up a decent privately-funded venture to deal in OSI software. The problem comes (as it always does) when the founders think they're the reincarnation of Steve Jobs and deserve a nine-or-ten-figure net worth for making a few nice, but ultimately not earth-shattering, software tools. Then they have to enshittify to get ready for the IPO.
To people starting projects today, you have no excuse, we know better. Don't use OSI open-source unless it's entirely a labor of love that you're giving away free.
OSI Open-source business models are dead. Don't make that mistake.