

Is making your product free and open source crazy talk? - jenwike
https://opensource.com/business/14/7/interview-Patrick-McFadin-Datastax

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mindcrime
All our our products are Open Source and the code is freely available and
Apache licensed. But despite that, in a sense, our "products" are NOT free.
What I mean is, when you buy a subscription, what you're buying isn't the
bits, or the code... you're buying our _assurance_ that that particular
combination of bits works in a certain way, and that you can call somebody and
get help if they don't work, and the assurance that if the shit hits the fan
at 2am there's support there, assurance that patches will be made available on
a defined time-frame, assurance that there will be somebody available to
provide training, professional services, etc.

And companies care about this sort of thing. And, by and large, they're happy
to pay for it. Which is why Red Hat can do a billion dollars in revenue,
despite the availability of CentOS and Scientific Linux.

So, no, I don't think make your products free and open source is "crazy talk"
especially in a B2B / enterprise software scenario.

