The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source

Re:The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source by pdonis on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @05:47PM (#17822504)

> both Salvatore (Antirez) and Shai worked on their projects for years, with minimal support from the outside world, grew their community organically, and managed to build something useful for thousands of grateful developers. Later, they looked for ways to make a good living

In other words, making a good living from the product was an afterthought. So they shouldn't be surprised that they're not getting as much value for themselves out of the product as they would have if making a good living from it was a fundamental part of the project from the beginning.

That's not to say that there aren't ways to monetize open source products, just that doing it as an afterthought isn't one of them. If it's a business, it's a business, and you have to treat it that way from day one. Otherwise you will be out-competed, as a business, by others who do.

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Re:The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source by zapita on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @06:03PM (#17822644)

> That's not to say that there aren't ways to monetize open source products, just that doing it as an afterthought isn't one of them.

Says who? You are entitled to your opinion on the matter, but this is a very contested issue and your opinion is just one of many. If you’re going to argue that Redis and Elastic are “doing open-source monetization wrong”, maybe you should back up your claim with arguments.

> If it's a business, it's a business, and you have to treat it that way from day one. Otherwise you will be out-competed, as a business, by others who do.

You seem very knowledgeable about what is and is not a good monetization strategy for open-source. What do you propose as an alternative to what Elastic and Redis are doing?

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Re:The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source by pdonis on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @07:29PM (#17823185)

> If you’re going to argue that Redis and Elastic are “doing open-source monetization wrong”, maybe you should back up your claim with arguments.

I did. Did you read my post?

> What do you propose as an alternative to what Elastic and Redis are doing?

As an alternative now? I'm not sure there is one. Their products are already out there being monetized by others.

As an alternative back when they started? They could have let everyone know that they were aiming to monetize their products as a business from the beginning. Then they would have been taking on for themselves the business risks that cloud providers, for example, took on by building infrastructure using their products and trying to sell it to users.

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