Re:AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
by dragonwriter on Thursday January 21, 2021 @05:57PM
(#25865754)
I don’t think VC-backed startups do that. They open source code because open source materially benefits adoption and mindshare, which grows the potential market for services, and that’s how they end up with big valuations selling premium services on top of their open source core.
Of course, sometimes they get mad that this also enables other people to sell premium services on top of the open source core, and sometimes those other people can make more money because they are major incumbents that integrate other offerrings. But that doesn’t mean the startup would have been better or grown faster or sold more of its own services if it hadn’t been open source.
It also doesn’t mean closing-up negates that competition: once the value of the product is proven, the major incumbents also have had proven for them the potential value of funding a fork with its own dedicated team, which can reap the community reach benefits of open source and compete with the relative upstarts now-proprietary offering.
Of course, sometimes they get mad that this also enables other people to sell premium services on top of the open source core, and sometimes those other people can make more money because they are major incumbents that integrate other offerrings. But that doesn’t mean the startup would have been better or grown faster or sold more of its own services if it hadn’t been open source.
It also doesn’t mean closing-up negates that competition: once the value of the product is proven, the major incumbents also have had proven for them the potential value of funding a fork with its own dedicated team, which can reap the community reach benefits of open source and compete with the relative upstarts now-proprietary offering.