Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk

Re:Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to... by hnarn on Thursday March 18, 2021 @09:53AM (#26502673)

Thank you for licensing this under a proper open source license. Out of curiosity, how would you feel about a company selling this as a service? It's obviously legal per the license, but I'm wondering what your perspective is. If you encourage it, do you have any plans for how to ensure everybody are happy and turns a profit from it?

I have grown cynical over the years with these kinds of open source challengers as it seems to be a playbook these days to bait and switch, going from a) freely license a competitor to b) build a large user base to c) switch license to consolidate power over the software, make money and slowly kill it.

Of course what's once open source will always stay that way, but if you're large enough when you branch, your engineering resources alone might be enough to turn people off the OSS fork.

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Re:Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to... by pranav_rajs on Thursday March 18, 2021 @10:36AM (#26503145)

There are people who have built custom solutions on top of Chatwoot and selling it. There are people who are selling it in their country without changing the code and making profit out it. I'm happy to help those people out (not for free, would charge something obiviously). There are different markets where we might not be able to cater. Since the solution is flexible enough to build custom channels, I've seen people using it as "Whatsapp CRM for X country".

We are following the path Gitlab has taken. To sustain as a business, we will have some modules suited for large enterprises under an EE license, but it would not hinder the open-source part and the freedom that comes with it. If people want to build on Chatwoot, they will be free to do that.

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Re:Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to... by fblp on Friday March 19, 2021 @02:06AM (#26510503)

I'm wondering if you've considered an additional option - "donation subscriptions". For people who are deriving a lot of value from a fork, and want to support you!

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Re:Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to... by pranav_rajs on Friday March 19, 2021 @02:18AM (#26510540)

Github sponsors work that way!

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Re:Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to... by samblr on Thursday March 18, 2021 @11:15AM (#26503536)

Curious on on how ee license works - will it not stop somebody to take that source and run it for free ? or do parallel implementation on top of your free offerings.

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Re:Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to... by pranav_rajs on Thursday March 18, 2021 @11:27AM (#26503640)

We expect to follow Gitlab's path on this. There will be 2 repos. One with EE licensed code and the other one completely foss.

eg: Gitlab[0] vs Gitlab FOSS [1] code

[0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss

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