Thread by @swyx

This year I've done a total 180 on open source strategy.

Remember Elastic making a fuss with "Amazon: NOT OK"? I was quite persuaded. If MongoDB, Redis, Cockroach, Confluent relicensed and do fine, maybe SSPL just becomes acceptable "open source".

Now I think MIT is just fine.

Probably my biggest test of confidence was in March when @martin_casado and @davidu pushed back on the open source religion - if your monetization is SaaS, then open source is just marketing (there's nuance here, pls read his replies before reacting)

https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1373425786351284228

Open sourcing has a cost - at @temporalio it impacts decisionmaking in engineering, product, docs, devrel. Tradeoffs we wouldn't have if we just had a free tier.

But look at how extensively @NetflixEng has been able to adapt our SDKs and devtools:

To put Temporal inside of Netflix's "paved road", they needed every part of the stack to adapt to their needs, from Fast Properties (config store) to Chaos Monkey (fault injection) to Metatron (certs) to Wall-E (authn) to Gandalf (authz) to their own flavor of gRPC.

They didn't ask permission to do that.

We didn't anticipate them doing that.

But they did it anyway.

Every month our users teach us something new about the platform we built – because Open Source.

community.temporal.io/t/using-dynami…

Now the hard question: Could Amazon host Temporal as a service?

Yes. Just like Hashicorp does (

https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1316510643030114304?s=20

), or Stripe (come learn more at our Nov meetup temporal.io/meetup), or {REDACTED_BIGCORP}, in a long tradition that goes back to our origins at Uber.

Amazon merely adopted the open source.

@temporalio was born in it, molded by it.

Countless nontechnical concerns ("you're just series A, how can we rely on you?") addressed with: "Here's our code. No strings attached."

Open source decouples tech adoption from vendor maturity.

@temporalio That is not to say we aren't mature! Just that it buys time and trust. We are already SOC2Type2 certified and serving multi-bn $ publicly listed companies in production. We're just not GA/self serve yet.

(We're taking waitlist signups for Temporal Cloud temporal.io/cloud)

@temporalio The rest of OSS startup moat I reckon comes down to 2 things:

- Sweat the DX: Intuitive, honest docs. Treating onboarding like game design. Handling exceptions (

https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1294689838872981506?lang=en

). Build a media company around domain, then build community.

Mindshare -> market share.

@temporalio - Product: what else can you build to serve power users? eg Apollo Studio, MongoDB Atlas, Hashicorp Vault

Companies become platforms when they ship the *2nd* blockbuster product.

They become generational when their loops make any product a blockbuster.

https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1367518496326709251

ok, ok, 1 more way you can beat Amazon:

Support. Offer a shared Slack with SLA. Enterprise contracts are being closed on basic premise that "someone who knows what the heck is going on is on Slack with you, whether we are down or you are".

Beats this:

https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1402049900079026184

correction from @sogrady on store-brand licenses - i was aware of some but secretly hoping the industry would settle on SSPL - instead, Elastic seems to have gone and made its own license! :(

further cements my belief in @joshsimmons' OSI™ open source

https://twitter.com/sogrady/status/1448143582695677953?s=20