[spectre256]

I run a company that offers consulting and hosted services around a 100% open core (https://geocode.earth, shameless plug).

As someone who has a very strong desire to continue to be able to make a living while making open source software, I've been thinking long and hard about all the possible paths to take while maintaining open-source software as a job that pays the bills enough to run at least a small business.

Some paths and possible outcomes are:

- Open-core: Make most code pure open source, and then save some good stuff for pure proprietary. The lines are not _too_ blurred here, but this can get annoying. (Elastic's X-Pack was _super_ annoying to deal with back in the 2.x days). Risks: you have to balance crippling the core versus building compelling proprietary features. You have to add additional complexity into both codebases to deal with a clean delineation. Amazon (or other bigco) can re-implement open-source replacements for your proprietary parts.

- Source-available: This in my mind includes any of the recent Redis Labs style licenses. Pros: more convenient from a setup perspective. Cons: Incredible legal risk for your users (compliance is harder). Uncertainty as all these licensees are new and possibly one-offs. Currently, there is a lack of goodwill around these licenses. Amazon can re-implement your entire interface (like with Mongo).

- All open source: Simple, clean, but Amazon can just take all your code and replace you, right?

It's possible to assume that all scenarios end poorly, but I really don't think so.

Take any famous chef. They probably have published a cookbook with recipes for many, if not all of their most popular dishes. People still eat at their restaurants for at least the following reasons:

- They want to experience the dish from the actual chef's establishment. Whether it's to be sure they're getting the real deal or simply for the image aspects of the experience, it's still worth it.

- They know that the chef is always experimenting and pushing new things that aren't _yet_ in a cookbook, and they want to try it.

Bringing this back to software, I am confident Elastic still has a reputation of being able to build a better Elasticsearch hosted service than AWS (in my experience, Elastic's is far superior). I also am confident that Elastic will continue to innovate using their proven experience building search products in the future, and that's a good reason to use their products or software over AWS.

I believe that if you want to make money in open source you should do it by having valuable experience with some particular open source software that others are willing to pay for, not by building legal barriers to others doing the same thing. That's what I plan to do for my business and I believe Elastic can and will do it too.

My hope is that in a few years after all these "clever" attempts to build moats around open source have proven futile, people will go back to good old-fashioned experience leading the way. But maybe I shouldn't hold my breath.

[anth_anm]

You're incredibly naive and I hope you don't end up feeling screwed over by one of the big companies in a few years.

[spectre256]

Honestly, if the open source project we maintain ever becomes popular enough that a big company like Amazon puts effort into supplanting us, great.

We'll be known as the team that created and grew the project, and we'll have a guaranteed job at Amazon and a bunch of other places doing something we have unique experience with.

My goal isn't to leverage open-source software into enough of a moat to build a billion dollar company. If it was, then I might be unhappy if Amazon broke that moat.

I'm totally happy building a sustainable small business. Maybe even one that won't last forever. Our team is small, our costs are low, and we are comfortable. We are growing, sustainably, and providing real value to our customers in the process (or they wouldn't pay us the rates we require to stay in business).