Re:Open Source Bait and Switch
by EdwardDiego on Monday September 26, 2022 @06:15PM
(#32989304)
Yeah, I was at Red Hat for a bit, and loved the business model - sup, we employ a lot of the lead devs on FOSS projects you use, so we've got fantastic support for you.
And that's it, no "enterprise editions", the only extra code you're paying for is backported critical patches, and deterministic builds of software (and all its dependencies) from source. RH puts a huge amount of effort into those builds, it's incredibly painful as an RH dev sometimes, but it seems to be a huge factor in building trust.
But, I can see why it doesn't really work for other companies, step 1 is "Be Red Hat, and have Red Hat's reputation."
I've been involved in Kafka a bit, and it's been very sad seeing Confluent devs having to deprioritise work on FOSS Kafka to focus work on stuff that, well, they can sell for money, but I totally get why.
It isn't just the Indie devs it is the smaller businesses as well. Those are the ones pulling license changes, doing "freemium" models and other things that the OSS community is objecting to and the author is throwing shade at. Those models are NOT working well or we wouldn't be having these discussions.
The models that "work" for the coder are just tossing your code into public and not caring because it is a side project or something that you're doing to learn to code and you'll abandon it in a few years. Or else working for an existing Fortune 500 company getting hired to work on open source, or one of the few large open source foundations (sponsored heavily by massive corporations and/or academia).
And I worked for the past 10 years in open source at a startup-to-small-business getting paid by my employer for open source. That model is not very good, which is why we're seeing so many issues with "bait and switch" at those kinds of smaller corporations.