[0] http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2019/05/foss4g-keynote-2019.ht...
2. "IP is free, support for $$" like Red hat is a viable business model but captures only a very small part of the overall value. The much larger part is captured by private sector selling SaaS, Cloud infra vendors. Software has become a commodity, it is user-facing services that capture value today.
3. The value capturing works fine for the companies but little to nothing of that value flows back to the people who write or maintain the software. This needs to be overcome. Openness is important but we need to value it, and governments as biggest buyers of services play a role. If we valued openness more consequently, it would lead to more opportunities for open source developers to capture value by offering user-facing services.
> "IP is free, support for $$" like Red hat is a viable business model but captures only a very small part of the overall value. The much larger part is captured by private sector selling SaaS, Cloud infra vendors.
Isn't this the value captured by open core? Support is only part of premium services, while companies are free to choose any additional revenue stream (SaaS, extensions, integrations, etc.).
My interpretation of why the talk was mentioned as an argument contra open core: - the talk does have criticism for value extraction that does not preserve openness (as the OP says: promises of interop etc are not kept, lock-in... is it really meaningfully "open"?), and that it is not necessarily sustainable or fair for OSS developers ("who pays the postgres committers"). This latter point certainly gets more nuanced for open core, but can still be relevant e.g. when you depend on some library you are interested in its being maintained, having security vulnerabilities identified and patched etc.
Come on, did you actually read the article or skim the first paragraphs?
The authors point is that open core is not a model that enables small time developers to fund their projects.
…it’s a deceptive, deliberate marketing strategy funded by venture capital to run a loss leader and capture market share, then bait-and-switch to a cloud hosted product.
It’s been shown to be successful, and new companies are cynically adopting it as “free marketing”.
Even when the initial ideals are honest, the model is fundamentally incompatible with running a for-profit enterprise due to obvious (and explicitly pointed out in the article) misaligned incentives.
Don’t encourage it. It’s deceitful. If you’re doing it, you’re being a dick. :(
Being honest from the beginning as per the examples at the end of the article are what we should encourage.
> I just believe that more businesses can find ways to make open source contributions core to their business, without resorting to the typical open core strategy. There’s a lot of nuance in creating better aligned incentives.
Their problem really is just with _this particular behavioral pattern of VC-raising startups whose software is open-core_, which is why they criticize "The Open Core Strategy". They are not against open-core in itself, just that it is incompatible with the profit incentives these companies have, where it quite literally turns into calculating ROI for "how many new users will see this new feature in the Core product and then be converted into paid users within 6 months".
Also, based only off of the description for shipyard they mention here, it sounds like you either can't execute low code templates offline, or can't fork the project without recreating both the UI and the execution logic, both of which seem to violate the spirit of free software.
100%. I want more people to figure out ways to make open source work with the business model. Typical open core tends to end up in a situation where you're serving two masters, but one pays you. Which one would you rather work for?
>it sounds like you either can't execute low code templates offline, or can't fork the project without recreating both the UI and the execution logic, both of which seem to violate the spirit of free software.
Must have been poorly worded then. Our low-code templates are just visual wrappers around Python CLIs that contain no proprietary platform logic. You don't need our UI to run them locally.
Red Hat has built a business on free software without resorting to open core. Why can't anyone else (according to you)?
FD: Kitware employee
So what is the difference between this and if it just weren't open source at all? I see the marketing benefit to the producers of having people consider it "open source", even though eventually they'll be locked in and have to pay for the value they want.
What is the benefit to the consumer? Real question. I'm not certain there is none. Perhaps the open core being truly open source, at least other developers can look at that code as a learning resource, or even fork it into something else? (Note that requires it being really open source, that is legally forkable under a really open source license that will allow it to achieve a life of it's own). I could be persuaded that makes it better than if it were just proprietary license altogether? Anything else?
At the end of the day we must remember that people need to make money and most simply don't have the time or desire to make open-source for free. And until more people actually get adequately paid for making open-source, open core should not only be tolerated but encouraged. Because the alternative is open-source projects dying or people just not making open-source at all.
Now there are definitely people and companies that put "open" on things which are not open* (e.g. OpenAI, or any ML company which claims a model is open-source but does not distribute the weights). But if a project has 100% of the code public and an open-source license, the project is "open-source" and the owner can't just take it back. If they try, or try to steer the project in a proprietary direction, the community can fork.
So open-source with paid auxillary services, support and training, and a GPL (maybe not AGPL) license is still open-source and IMO completely fine. Ultimately, the ability to fork and self-host is what differentiates real open-source from fake.
* Because on the other hand, providing a facade of open source is usually also the only way for many to popularize a commercial library. For many reasons, solo developers and businesses don't want to use closed-source binaries. Some other SE projects e.g. languages are like this as well. So we have genuine people just trying to make a living and greedy executives abusing buzzwords both choosing "open core".