
Ask HN: Can a company be built using open source code? - tiuPapa
Well, for companies like Docker or Mongo, I guess their revenue model is to provide support for enterprise customers. But can a new company like say the next Uber or Facebook or Netflix or Amazon be built on top open source products where their core offering is available for everyone to check and read? What about licensing the code? What kind of licenses should they use?
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tedmiston
You nailed it with the first part. Another big example is Mesosphere. Yes, you
can open source everything* (my company does) because most B2B customers don't
want to bother running it. Most small ones would rather just use your SaaS and
not have to run and maintain some boxes, if they're even that technical.

Not to mention cloud pricing these days is complexed and nuanced when your app
uses a bunch of services and deals with lots of inbound and outbound traffic —
more things customers don't want to deal with.

Most big companies want support around the clock and are used to going for
enterprise licensing deals. At the end of the day, you're providing a solution
to their problems, and hosting and running the code for them makes solving
their problem and their lives easier. If a problem costs them $50k in lost
revenue or opportunities, and you solve it for $45k, you have a happy
customer, even if they could have done a lot of work and run it themselves for
say $20k.

I don't think this works as well in the B2C space, but it really depends on
the price point of your service and your user base. For instance, I run a
Ghost blog because I can have the skills to install and maintain it, which
isn't much, and they charge $20/mo for their SaaS while I can run it on
DigitalOcean for $5/mo.

*except a small bit of secret sauce

~~~
chatmasta
To add to this, open sourcing your code also provides a bit of insurance
policy if your company ever goes out of business. This is especially helpful
in infrastructure markets; businesses don’t want to build their foundation
around proprietary dependencies that might disappear when their creator
company goes belly-up. If the code is open sourced, then even in the event of
you going out of business, your customers can find a way to recover.

There is also the nice bonus that open sourcing your code means you’ll get a
bunch of “free” contributions, bug fixes and security reviews.

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git-pull
I think product-izing open source projects is a long shot, but:

I would go the SAAS route, the way WordPress.com does it. Self-serve DIY
hosting and enterprise clients (the kind of stuff you'd have account managers
for).

There also is a recipe for a permissively licensed library, with a commercial
front-end: spaCy, the NLP library [1], and prodi.gy, the front-end [2].

The spaCy devs are my favorite success story. A solid library, and using their
know-how to create a value-added front-end on top of it.

There is a lot in play when this happens. SaltStack is a superb configuration
management system. But when I make tickets on GH to pressure them to make
things more fluid for non-enterprise deployments, they don't get much
traction. I can't help their bottom line, and their incentive to cater to
enterprise clients takes them astray from the values that made it great: the
masterless, solo quickstart [3] (this is strongly my own observation).

By far the biggest usage of open source is going to be intermixing
permissively licensed libraries and build tools in larger works. By the time
you see a polished service or product, you may not be able to tell what it's
built in, even though they stand on the shoulders of giants. PS4 and Switch is
built on FreeBSD.

[1] [https://spacy.io/](https://spacy.io/) [2]
[https://prodi.gy/](https://prodi.gy/) [3]
[https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/tutorials/quicks...](https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/tutorials/quickstart.html)

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cjbprime
Sure. Amazon seems like a good example -- if the source code to the site and
backend were released, you'd still have a company as profitable because the
hard part is the global logistics work, relationships made, warehouses they've
built and staffed.

I don't think it matters which license is used in most cases. GPL vs BSD used
to be a big argument, less so now that we're not all running desktop software
on our own machines for everything.

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africajam
I'm hoping so though from where I am now it looks like it will be a long road
ahead ;)

[https://opencollective.com/property_web_builder](https://opencollective.com/property_web_builder)

