We built the fastest CI in the world and it failed

Re:We built the fastest CI in the world and it failed by hnlmorg on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @04:15PM (#37487537)

> I'm not sure feature withholding has traditionally worked out well in the developer space.

It’s worked well for GitHub, Slack, and pretty much every service that only offer SSO behind enterprise subscriptions.

The trick is to offer enough to make people productive but not so much that there isn’t a worthwhile upgrade path.

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Re:We built the fastest CI in the world and it failed by dpeckett on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @04:35PM (#37487848)

True (for web apps and multiuser applications).

Earthly is a single binary CLI on top of Docker buildkit so it's a bit trickier for them.

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Re:We built the fastest CI in the world and it failed by hnlmorg on Wednesday September 13, 2023 @03:26AM (#37493340)

I’m not claiming it’s easy. Just that withholding features while still offering free tiers is a tried and tested business model that has demonstrated a lot of success for a lot of companies.

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Re:We built the fastest CI in the world and it failed by edgyquant on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @07:42PM (#37490219)

Neither GitHub nor slack are open source

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Re:We built the fastest CI in the world and it failed by hnlmorg on Wednesday September 13, 2023 @03:25AM (#37493333)

Both GitHub and Slack have free tiers. Same principle, different software license.

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Re:We built the fastest CI in the world and it failed by edgyquant on Wednesday September 13, 2023 @05:28PM (#37501957)

It isn’t the same principle though. Slack and GitHub can sell data to make a profit etc but the problem with open source is people can just host it themselves meaning the creators don’t even have that option.

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Re:We built the fastest CI in the world and it failed by hnlmorg on Thursday September 14, 2023 @02:31AM (#37505677)

Plenty of organisations prefer to have managed options and thus pay for SaaS, even from open source vendors, rather than hosting their own.

Also you’re getting too caught up in specifics and missing the broader point. You want open source examples? How about Nexus, Redhat, nginx, prettier much all of Hashicorps offerings, basically half of why AWS resell.

The real issue with commercial open source isn’t restricting access to customers, it’s restricting access to resellers. As demonstrated with the examples above.

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