Implementing billing and setting pricing is next on my TODO list!
Whereas your competitor just needs to build a hosted version, use the core you provide for free, thereby having a fraction of the expense and the ability to undercut you on price.
You have to realize going in that once you try to monetize your open source, some of your users become your competitors. They’ll tell you how great you are, while cashing checks off your hard work.
1. Trust over a product or platform can be formed in many ways. Opensource is an irreversible way of doing that. I have often seen people equate opensource to free usage of the product, it is great for adoption but very bad when it comes to monetization. Even if your project is available as OSS if you don't have community around it, disappearance of the org is still a threat.
2. If there is no market, you don't any incentive to maintain it forever. Google fusion tables is probably that case. The market perhaps was not large enough.
3. I do buy into incentive to opensource for building an eco-system
4. I do buy into the larger impact argument but question is - will you keep maintaining it if there is no incentive for you in the process?
I have seen lately, lot of VC backed orgs posting OSS as a differentiating factor than their competitors. I am not sure if I would buy into that argument.
Speaking personally, Datasette is the first project I've worked on in my entire career where I'm confident that I would be delighted if I was still working on it in 10-15 years time.
The space it operates in - analyzing, exploring and publishing data about the world we live in - has completely limitless appeal to me. Every project I've ever cared about can be attached to it, especially given the plugin architecture which supports me trying out all kinds of weird and interesting applications for the core technology.
If I can't make it work financially it can go back to being a side-project for me. I'm confident the financial side of it can work though.
I feel the same way about cloud custodian and starting stacklet, but I also put stuff into a foundation, so that it has proper survivability beyond the org, irrespective of the org's decisions (Ala hashicorp), and true survivability and impact on an oss project means getting past individual contributor bus factor.
That's a bus factor of 1?
You know what's more cool though? A 100 years: https://archive.is/qnWWX (didn't work out all that well for Evernote, regardless). I'm sorry but this script has been sequel'd over again and again. May be, just may be, you're a unicorn (:
Trust comes from building a healthy ecosystem of users, which ultimately comes from building a good product.
Trust comes from the publisher/author being truthful and honest with users, nothing else. By publishing source code, an open source software publisher is making a strong statement towards trust: you can see everything. Nothing is hidden (this is not true though when a company uses an open source client and closed source back end strategy).
> There's a litany of open source projects that I have used that have been completely abandoned.
There's also a litany of abandoned closed source commercial software and SaaS products. Keeping commercial software alive requires money. Keeping open source alive requires time. In the end, both are scarce and the author/publisher has to make a decision on what to invest in, and sometimes the software they sold to me last year doesn't get that investment. If it did, I'd still be using NBI Legacy to write documents, I'd be running OS/2, Microsoft Bob would be helping users make Windows work, and I could read news with Google Reader (aside Bob, all of these were at least good products. Bob was... ahead if it's time).
What trust is seeing how a product has evolved over 5-10 years.
I think you’re missing my point. My point is focusing on whether a project is open source is relatively meaningless. It’s like using the price at a restaurant to judge the quality of food… it’s almost meaningless.
The public good still exists no matter what people in business think. It just takes awhile to effect your bottom line if you ignore it.
Yes, but being able to continue using, and even fixing bugs in the abandoned project is way, way better than having a useless pile of bits because the license server was taken offline. If may not be a great situation and you may well want to migrate to something else, but it is a far more graceful exit than closed-source software usually is.
> Trust comes from building a healthy ecosystem of users, which ultimately comes from building a good product.
This isn't enough. Great products with many users are often acquired and shut down or just change their licensing strategy to be unsuitable (either too expensive or too restrictive).
1. I want organizations (initially newsrooms that care about data journalism, but rapidly growing beyond that) to be able to trust the product. The default result of 95% of startups is to go out of business, and going all-in on a product that then blinks out of existence is bad! When I'm selecting a vendor this is a thing I always consider, so I'd like my customers to feel confident that they have the ultimate escape hatch - run it yourself - should they ever need it.
2. Newsrooms in particular have learned this lesson before, many times over - and not just for startups. Remember Google Fusion Tables? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fusion_Tables That's just one relatively recent example.
3. Datasette is an ecosystem play. There are over 100 plugins already - https://datasette.io/plugins - and I hope for there to be thousands more. Developers don't invest nearly as heavily in building and releasing plugins for closed-source platforms.
4. Open source is a way for me to punch _way_ above my weight. I can have a much larger impact on the world by participating in open source, compared to if everything I'd been building had been closed.