On: Ask YC: What are the downsides of open source?

[davidw]

I'm more or less in agreement. The problem is scarcity - what you can make people pay for because it's scarce:

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-...

Looking at several successful "open source" oriented companies, we can see what kind of scarcity they introduced:

- Mysql, as you say, had their wonky licensing and a commercial product.

- Redhat decided to not license the 'branding' component of their distribution under a free license, so while you can copy the software, you have to remove a lot of bits and pieces (which CentOS has done), and it's not really Redhat anymore... If you want the support, you have to pay their licensing fees.

- Cygnus was relatively successful, a while ago, and were successful because they seemed, IMO, to stick to the letter of the law rather than the spirit: they'd give their clients full source code, but didn't make it public. They did a lot of 'billing' work, too, IIRC.

Still - I think there are a lot of advantages to using open source, and in many cases there are even business cases for developing it, but it is hard to base a business exclusively on open source.

[tptacek → davidw]

If you make a development component, you can dual GPL/commercial license your product, like Sleepycat.

If you make an enterprise product, you can sell an appliance or a VM that runs it, and GPL the programs themselves, like SourceFire.

If you make a web product, you can GPL the code and sell the hosted version, like WordPress.

If you make an extensible product, you can GPL the core and sell the bells and whistles, like Splunk.

If you make an end-user product, you can GPL the core and sell the UI.

[davidw → tptacek]

Good examples, which confirm what I said: you have to introduce an element of scarcity somewhere, that is not the software itself (with the possible exception of GPL'ed libraries, but that's sort of a special case).