Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs

Re:Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Compet... by moreira on Thursday April 25, 2019 @04:38PM (#19752280)

You choose closed source and you get different early adopters. You don't get the same early adopters that try out every new open source project, and that's OK because you're not trying to run an open source project, you're trying to build a business. The people who would resent you for being closed source are just not your target market, and that's OK.

Open source is a choice. You get a lot of early adopters, yes, but the project is also completely out of your control. There's nothing stopping anyone else from taking it, putting more resources into it, and stealing your thunder.

If you're not happy with that idea, just don't make your code open source. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

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Re:Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Compet... by capkutay on Friday April 26, 2019 @12:52AM (#19754946)

There's also companies that create open source projects and go on to build highly differentiated value-add products on top of it. E.g. Databricks (owners of Apache Spark) who built a great SaaS product for managing data science pipelines. That product is so valuable it's almost as if they don't even need to monetize the spark project by itself.

What I don't like is the companies that create some open source project for the hype, then charge for a 'management console' or some marginal add-on.

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