Our great sponsors
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lago
Open Source Metering and Usage Based Billing API ⭐️ Consumption tracking, Subscription management, Pricing iterations, Payment orchestration & Revenue analytics
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Apache AGE
Graph database optimized for fast analysis and real-time data processing. It is provided as an extension to PostgreSQL. (by apache)
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SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
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windmill
Open-source developer platform to turn scripts into workflows and UIs. Fastest workflow engine (5x vs Airflow). Open-source alternative to Airplane and Retool.
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BrowserBox
🌀 Browse the web from a browser you run on a server, rather than on your local device. Lightweight virtual browser. For security, privacy and more! By https://github.com/dosyago
We are also open Source community at Apache https://github.com/apache/age
Interesting post and would like to bring nuance as the founder of an open-source alternative to Retool and Airplane: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill
Our enterprise edition is clearly cheaper (between 2-5x cheaper based on customers migrating away from those) than our competitors but we bet on volume and lack of sales team to make it up for it in terms of margins.
There are pragmatic reasons for it, our community/oss edition is featureful and include SSO so there is a temptation for our customers to just roll with the CE so we cannot be too greedy.
One could argue that support should be sufficient since the jobs ran by windmill are critical, but the main strength of a product like this is reliability and since we achieve near 100% reliability, it isn't sufficient. We are not gonna intentionally make our product less reliable on CE.
The other reason in my opinion is deeply rooted with the nature of open-source: software cost nothing to replicate and it would be a shame to have users not benefit from the right tools just so the pricing can extract as much $$$ as possible.
So ultimately it comes down to the tension between being VC funded (and we are but to a much lesser extent that our prop alternative) and the pricing of open-source. I am deeply convinced that there is a compromise that satisfies everyone by having the different force in presence being kept-in-check. VCs want small seed companies to scale to become a global companies, customers and users want to invest in a platform they know they won't have to regret later because of rent-seeking or lock-in practices. True OSS helps companies achieve global scale as long as their product is better (which make me agree with the substance of the post, being cheap is not enough) and also ensure that company can never or hardly employ dark patterns otherwise OSS fork of company's product will be too competitive against itself.
Before being a founder, I was among the most skeptical of OSS with VC backing and I really understand why someone would have a hard stance on it. But I came to realize that good software takes not only lots of hard work, but a focus and a dedicated team that is hard to find without a core team that has strong incentives to make something that people want. So I see the future being dominated by companies that fall somewhere in the following spectrum:
1. OSS products that are public utilities and there are enough needs or the project is interesting enough to have a strong core team that doesn't require VC backing
a typical open-source business needs profit to be the ultimate north star.
I totally agree. We're making profit our north star in BrowserBox at Dosyago. It's a hard balance to strike, but absolutely necessary.
As for competing on price being bad...I guess that's true if you go free, but aside from that, I think there's markets/segments where that works. And if you have the solution that can support a lower COGS then you have the room for that too.
A great case for an open-source solution is when a transparency problem is present. What is a transparency problem? It’s when a solution being closed source creates distrust between the client and vendor.
I totally agree with that too. It's one of the reasons I thought going full open source would work for our cybersecurity market. But I think there's also the reliability concern: many companies are concerned that going with a small vendor may lock them into a dead end if the vendor goes out of business, open source is like an escape hatch for the pressure of those concerns, by providing a guarantee that if you do go out of business they can keep using your product. I see this as less about licensing and more about access to the code. Breeding self-reliance in your clients is a recipe for scalability, and helps solves their reliability concerns. If you're the only source for updates and changes, you're a single point of failure. Open source is resilient in that way.
Come check us out: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox