Great article by Paul as usual. Although I think we differ in opinion on the effectiveness of open core, I largely agree with his points. Fundamentally, FOSS is not actually free. The 💰 must come from somewhere. I would like to clarify my point from my previous thread though.
I'm not suggesting that all OSS should be foundation funded. I agree that most successful OSS starts with VC, search, iPhone, ride share, etc. funding. Envoy would not exist without it.
What I am saying is that I think long term, single entity driven OSS, with a traditional open core model attempting to directly generate revenue, is at extreme risk of community alienation and disruption by an upstart competitor and/or ☁️ vendor.
Let me unpack the previous tweet. IMO traditional open core is blocking features in an OSS project behind a paywall. IMO it is NOT creating value added SaaS, management, UI, etc. features on top (separate but related SW systems).
As I said in my other thread, IMO traditional open core ultimately allienates the community because inevitably someone from the community will want to add a feature that competes with the paid offering.
Fundamentally, I believe it is more efficient in the end to build a thriving community, and then allow multiple entities to compete to provide value on top. I would call this "loose open core," full SaaS, or on-prem SaaS (customer runs a bundle of awesome themselves).
This value on top might be UIs, management systems, analytics engines, policy tools, cost analysis, etc. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one. The user feels like they are paying for something else, and not getting feature blocked in the OSS.
(I fully admit that some might find the previous tweet infuriatingly pedantic. Unfortunately, machines don't buy SW, people do.)
So now we come back to foundations. Paul is correct in his statement that Lyft may decide eventually that they no longer want to pay me to work on Envoy OSS. It makes sense. Most of the value has been extracted from their perspective. Then what? (This is not entirely academic.)
The foundation comes into play to facilitate the long term health of community driven projects in which *multiple entities are extracting business value from the SW.* How can they do that?
It's not that ALL funding will come from the foundation, but by providing fellowships they can ensure community driven leadership remains intact. This is super important, as it is the strength of the community that lets an ecosystem of businesses start and thrive.
More importantly, these businesses are better able to compete with the ☁️ vendors, because although the clouds are excellent at quickly building managed basic SaaS offerings, they are IMO still terrible at building the "extra special sauce" on top.
Thus, a thriving OSS community project allows everyone to win including both the clouds and small businesses building on top. And this is where foundations and fellowships can really help keep things on the right track for the most successful projects. Fin!
P.S. I intended for this to be short. Should have just written a blog post. Sorry. 😀
