"...to create and grow a competitive open source offering you need to have a proprietary commercial version to generate scalable revenue, support income alone is not enough."
I've often wondered if you can make money selling an open source software product that isn't dependent on support or services. In your application form, you're essentially saying this isn't possible.
Do you have any advice for people creating open source products regarding this view of open source vs closed source for sales and revenue?
Do you still feel that anyone with an open source product should also be providing a closed-source commercial version which will actually be the main source of revenue?
How have people in the Open Source field reacted to this viewpoint given that there is a strong negative reaction to closed source in some quarters.
I'd love to find a way of selling an open source product that didn't have to rely on a service contract or support for revenue. Is it impossible without a closed source offering?
Of course some products and markets have been able to make the support model work, like RedHat.
But it is very hard to pull off and I think it used to be easier in the past when companies where very worried about support and licensing. Nowadays they are much more comfortable with open source.
What we are seeing is that companies that pay for our premium support tend to cancel that after the first year because they didn't need it.
We want to make a product that is easy to install and maintain. This reduces the demand for support. There is a incentive for companies selling support to be a bit less aggressive documenting everything.
An open core model needs a very careful balance between being a good steward of the project and the need for revenue. We documented what we learned so far on https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship and keep our ears open on forums like these.
We've had conversations with board members at most of the major open source companies (eg: large and private or public)
and the consensus has been that you need a lot of components for the support contract to work.
One difference we've found for example that seems to work pretty well is providing support for deep learning models. Each "model" solves a problem like "face detection" "cat finder" "fraud detection" and we charge for the platform used each time for each model. This reflects the amount of work we do for customers but also provides an SLA for deep learning they might not otherwise have.
Source control has a wider user base and tends to favor an easy to install integrated experience.
Machine learning applications tend to have fewer people who know how to build them but they are just as critical for the business.
Eg: points of accuracy in a model can directly map to revenue or profits. That's easy to explain to an enterprise customer.
So despite the smaller potential user base "data scientists" in this case, we've found it fairly easy to go to market.
One thing I think people miss is that the bulk of open source infrastructure companies
tend to be devops or operating systems with lots of moving parts.
They don't tend to be applications or machine learning.
I think what a lot of us are finding is that you have to innovate on the business model itself in order to really capture value for both your user and the customer as well as your startup.
Yes, please coordinate with kirsten@gitlab.com for a 25 minute Google Hangout with me, please link to this comment in your email to her. If the advice is generic enough we might work with you to publish it https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/ceo-pref... (you have a final say in what gets published). This process was also used to produce the OP.
I got curious too; in the Berkeleyside article about it, they say "right now, posts come from a combination of community users, Wildfire staffers and local news partners, including Berkeleyside. To verify information, and decide whether or not to push out an alert to the community, the team checks posts against what is released by authorities and the local media, too."
If possible, private would be better for us. I'd be happy to make literally any 25' slot you have over the next 2 days. This is really generous of you, and we really appreciate it. Thanks!
No problem, please email kirsten@gitlab.com to coordinate a time, please link to this comment, if you want it the next 2 days my preference is Sunday 4pm Pacific but I'm not sure that works for you. I propose we do https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/ceo-pref... (you get to redact the notes)
