I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable. But setting that aside, I learned of WP Engine when they launched here, on hacker news. At the time their value proposition was "bullet proof and secure wordpress for people who just want to publish and not learn devops".
Over the years, I've watched them through a progression of management changes move from value of service to value extraction. Chipping away at costs while holding the price constant or raising it and extracting the difference for themselves. This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does, however I find the integrity around value extraction varies tremendously. From zero integrity Mackenzie type MBAs to high(er) integrity owner operators.
It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad.
My thoughts were posted in Mastodon: https://chaos.social/@ChuckMcManis/112429390169387783 but the TL;DR is that writing code adds value, and that value will be realized by people who take it for free, even if you don't want them to. From my perspective (not saying its the right one, just one that I've reasoned to) that is theft.
try releasing something under an open-but-not-open-source license as a solo developer or small team. there's a lot of established developers (presumably earning high salaries) that will very vocally badmouth the license choice. i'd seen this happen over and over again eg here, and when i've asked other developers why they open sourced their products they've said the same, and it was one of my concerns when i approached launch
sadly, my market fit was so bad that nobody ever looked at the license ::karma::
note: i have no problem with someone choosing not to use a product with a license they don't like (i do the same). it's the dissing of others that would use it that potentially crosses the line. i'm not even saying it *is* theft, only that there's a valid argument to that effect
There are 2 reasons freemium shared-source-style licenses are bad mouthed:
1. The products get advertised as open source; inviting people to look at it and contribute, the problem being that they are legal minefields, copyright or patents lawsuits that are waiting to happen. This was the biggest complaint against Microsoft's Shared Source initiative back in the day, and it's just as true now.
2. Some companies made their product popular via Open Source, like MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, took all the contributions and the free marketing, then switched; such instances being a bait-and-switch. Elasticsearch in particular is interesting because what they wanted was to withhold security patches from the OSS version, and Amazon got on the way by pushing PRs for patches.
All these cases are more glaring examples of value extraction, benefiting from unpaid labor.
There is nothing wrong with developing proprietary software, but you need to be honest about what you're selling.
> It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad.
It's not just rare, it's important to know that in many arrangements it's simply impossible. Once any company takes outside equity financing, every quarter is only looked at in terms of growth, and anything a company says should always be viewed in terms of "will this allow us to grow revenue." I'm not saying it makes all companies "evil", and there are a good deal of "do good" things that happen to coincide with growing revenue. But you can bet that if any principal requires going against growing revenue, it will be jettisoned in short order.
The only way to avoid this is to not take outside funding, and even then there is no guarantee what happens when the business is sold (and when a business is sold, the acquires are nearly always going to look at ROI solely from monetary returns).
> This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does
Yes it is. If you're hollowing out your value prop you better be returning at least some, if not a majority, of that value back to your users in the form of price drops or increased service levels. We have all been Stockholm Syndrome'd into believing otherwise as our favorite products and services institutionalize themselves into nothingness.
Ownership and management are mere stakeholders in the business, equal with (and no more) than customers and employees.
> rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable
Yes, I came to realize the same thing about open source, it was created with lofty ideals, but the practice is just the opposite. Of course, most people will not agree with this conclusion since the whole industry will tell them otherwise.
Obviously many people will use open source without contributing. The point of making it open source being that others will run into bugs, let you know about them, and maybe even try to fix them, especially if they also become or are reliant on the software. They might even want improvements to make it work for them and again work on them if they have a need for it. If a software is good and/or mature enough it doesn't need to be open source in the first place and doesn't need contributions. Wordpress has sort of reached that mature place where it is already 'good enough' but you can't now un-open source it.
Over the years, I've watched them through a progression of management changes move from value of service to value extraction. Chipping away at costs while holding the price constant or raising it and extracting the difference for themselves. This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does, however I find the integrity around value extraction varies tremendously. From zero integrity Mackenzie type MBAs to high(er) integrity owner operators.
It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad.