The fundamental issue is that people have a right to privacy and information. Open sourcing the code and designs is cool, but what about personal customer information? Why should the Chinese government have that? The contents of the services, if you will. That's the scariest part.

The parent comment I was replying to was talking about trade secrets, not customer information. But on that topic, the US has its own data-gathering operation which presumably is already collecting the same information. There is an opportunity here for someone to step up and speak against this practice.

Do you have evidence of ongoing mass surveillance practices in the U.S that is

> presumably is already collecting the same information

Do you have any evidence at all?

I would say that it's not the system that is prone to corruption - it is people in general.

Blaming "people in general" is exactly the kind of cop-out that leads these governments to dig their heels in on these overreaching policies. We can do better.

The examples of this model actually working economically are few and far between - and none that I know of in the case of consumer facing companies.

I'm not sure what you're talking about, what I'm describing is exactly the SaaS model which is already quite popular.

Which SaaS company open sourced their core infrastructure to the point you could self host their services?

The most prominent company doing this model now is Automattic. Most other SaaS companies run tons of open source... EXCEPT for the core product. I would like to stop this trend; self-hosting is not a problem but instead an opportunity to upsell. It's true though that YC founders in general do not seem to believe this and would rather build the same moat that everyone else is building. Even if it creates practical problems when going over to different markets, as seen in the article.

To the best of my knowledge, Automattic followed the success of the Wordpress open source project. It's an attempt to monetize an existing open source platform. The same goes for Docker, Elastic and others. The open source platform came first, then came the services.

Broadly speaking, I don't know why software is singled out in its economics. Creating software takes time of people. Time costs money, and much more of that when it comes to highly skilled engineers. The fact software has virtually no replication costs does not change the fact that its engineering is as expensive if not more so than engineering of other goods.

The open source project coming first and getting popular is the equivalent of finding product-market fit. I'm not singling this out, it's a potential alternate source of credit that can be combined with traditional investments although it doesn't have to be.

It's easy to sell external hosting when the product is a security nightmare, difficult to configure, and extremely resource intensive in its default state.

That's exactly why I think more companies should be pursuing this strategy.

Wordpress, Gitlab, MySql is also a company if memory serves, ...

> "Wordpress, Gitlab, MySql is also a company if memory serves, ..."

GitLab is open core, not open source: "We ship GitLab CE which is open source and GitLab EE that is closed source." from https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2016/07/20/gitlab-is-open-core...

(As an unrelated aside, given the number of people on HN that mistakenly think GitLab is open source, I'd say that "open core" as a marketing tactic has a real chance of becoming widespread in the future.)

Why would we sell services? Maybe we only want to sell product and let partners implement?

What the fuck are you actually talking about anyway? I'm a FOSS guy too but there's no way we should force it on everyone. If I want to write some code and not make the source available, why should you be able to dictate otherwise?

There's probably thousands of edge cases to your over simplistic thinking.